What do you like to read? Are you tired of the same old boy-meets-girl scenario, where their meeting is ruinous, and you spend the rest of your time reading about what you already knew would happen? I did, so I wrote Twelve Smooth Stones. For Christians who are attempting to live a holy life, many books that do have a great story line are also filled with foul language and intimate scenes with too much information.
My purpose for writing books is threefold:
- I wanted to give the Christian world a good read – a plot that twists and turns to a surprise ending.
- I wanted to keep it clean, so that a sanctified reader wouldn’t need to worry about what he or she might read on the next page.
- As a lover of history, I chose to write an historical fiction, so that my readers would not only be safely entertained, but would learn something as well.
- I want to write about genuine salvation: what it looks like, and how the struggle unfolds into the best decision a person can make.
Twelve Smooth Stones sprouted from the seed of this thought: Is there any correlation between the twelve stones upon Aaron’s breastplate, which represent the twelve tribes of Israel, and the twelve foundations of heaven, representing the twelve apostles? What if a young Jewish girl owned a locket – a family heirloom, which bore the twelve stones of the Israeli tribes? What if that same locket helped her to see heaven’s foundations, forcing her to consider the apostles’ leader Jesus, as the possible Messiah?
Then the idea came to write a story, which placed the life of Queen Esther from the Bible into a 20th century setting. The result was Twelve Smooth Stones, the story about Esther Ruth Raul, a sixteen-year-old Jewess living in Amsterdam in 1944. She and her family are brutally forced from their home and end up at Auschwitz, where SS Officer Kurt Gerstein chooses her for a special task because of her beauty. Herr Gerstein is a Jewish sympathizer whose plan is to save lives, even if only a few. What will happen to Esther after the war, now that she is Kurt’s wife? How did she get to Israel and then America? And what about her high school sweetheart, Gabriel Bachman? How can he face the unknown about his family and Esther?
Beyond Common Sense 