Cynthia L. Moore

In A Promise for Spring by ACF Book of the Year novelist Kim Vogel Sawyer, Geoffrey Garrett leaves his 17-year-old fiancée in England while he establishes his Kansas ranch and builds her a proper house. But when he sends for her five years later in 1874, it's clear her feelings have changed far more than his. Despite his desire to marry and her wish to leave, they forge a compromise. If she remains as the ranch's housekeeper until spring, he will pay for her trip back home.

Why we think it’s a great listen: Seabiscuit was a runaway success, and Hillenbrand’s done it again with another true-life account about beating unbelievable odds. On a May afternoon in 1943, an Army Air Forces bomber crashed into the Pacific Ocean and disappeared, leaving only a spray of debris and a slick of oil, gasoline, and blood. Then, on the ocean surface, a face appeared....

Mackenzie Allen Philips' youngest daughter, Missy, has been abducted during a family vacation and evidence that she may have been brutally murdered is found in an abandoned shack deep in the Oregon wilderness. Four years later in the midst of his Great Sadness, Mack receives a suspicious note, apparently from God, inviting him back to that shack for a weekend. Against his better judgment he arrives at the shack on a wintry afternoon and walks back into his darkest nightmare.