Cape Refuge is a small southern town on an island off the coast of Savannah, Georgia. Everyone knows everyone else and everyone is very friendly. It is a nice quite place to live and raise a family. But one night in the middle of a raging storm Police Chief Cade was racing to the location of a fallen power line to detour traffic when a man stepped out in front of his patrol car in the heavy rain and Cade had no chance of avoiding him. He struck the man sending him up into the windshield of the cruiser. Cade rushed to the man’s side and found him bleeding but not quite unconscious. He summoned an ambulance and got the man to the hospital but he didn’t make it.
Once they located the man’s car and identified him Cade and his girlfriend Blair went to his home in Savannah and notified his widow. The next day Cade was seen talking to a woman outside the café who later turned out to be the widow. Cade disappeared, launching Blair on a detective quest to find out who kidnapped him and why.
At the same time someone was kidnapping babies from hospitals. A woman dressed as a nurse entered the room of a mother with her newborn infant telling the mother she needed to take the infant out to the doctor so the baby could be examined. Thirty or forty minutes later when the mother asked why her infant had not been returned she learned that there had not been a nurse from the staff in to take the baby. The baby and woman were gone, never to be seen again.
How are the death of the man, the distraught widow and the kidnappings of babies related? Black stock takes through a winding journey wherein her characters question their faith in God and even come to an epiphany where Jesus is accepted as their savior. In the end the kidnappers and killers are caught and faith in God’s all-knowing and compassionate love are justified.
The story in “Southern Storm” is well told and will even bring on some tears at points. It is a good tale and rates a 6 of 10 on the Weaver meter.
