Hideaway Home

 Hideaway Home plunks the reader down smack in the middle of World War II America where Bertie (Roberta) Moenning, our heroine, is being trained as a machinist in the Hughes aircraft factory in California that's putting out military equipment for the war effort. 

Meanwhile the guys in the trenches are waiting for mail from home and some are getting "dear john" letters.  But Bertie is a one woman letter writing effort.  She's writing to our hero Red Meyers who's been fighting in Europe and also writing to any guy on the front Red tells her about who's not getting mail.  Since she can't write to them all, she's got her best friend Edith Frost writing to some of the boys as well as other girls at the factory.  Edith is a war widow, having lost her husband at Pearl Harbor.

Red comes home injured at the end of the war in Europe when there's only what he calls "clean up" left there.  Red had stopped writing to Bertie those last few weeks when he was having surgery in a military hospital and it was really upsetting Bertie that she hadn't heard from him.  When he does come home, he's got a limp and he's shell shocked.  At one point he hears a car back fire and hits the ground, thinking he's under artillery attack.

Bertie and Red are descendants of German immigrants, and once Red's home a bit he's finding out some troubling things about Hideaway.  There's hatred against these German American people, in fact soon Bertie's father Joseph is found dead in his field.  So, Red has to phone Bertie telling her to come home from California.

Berties arrives in her Ozark hometown of Hideaway with her friend Edith.  The town sherrif is calling her father's death an accident, but Red is sure it's murder.  Red was a really good tracker in the war and he begins tracking around the murder site and other sites in Hideaway where ethnic hate crimes were committed.  He keeps finding the same large man's with a deep cut in it.

Bertie's mom had died a few years before and her brother's come down with tuberculosis, so she's got to handle things.  Yet inspite of all these troubles, she deeply believes God is in charge. 

Red keeps avoiding Bertie, even at her dad's funeral.  He thinks he's half a man now, that he has nothing to offer.  Bertie had learned some healing arts with herbs from her mom, while she was alive, and keeps at Red to let her try to heal him with herbs.  Red keeps putting her off until she determines she's going to do it anyway.  She goes down toward the caves in Hideaway (that appear in other Hannah Alexander books in this series) to pick these healing herbs - and there she overhears a conversation she shouldn't have heard and the killer spots her. 

This is a wonderful read.  It's got just the right mix of suspense and romance, as well as some folksy humor.  It also shows the reader how women in America started taking on some masculine roles during the war effort.  Of course in this book, Bertie and Edith show us how women can do these things in a godly way.

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