Clear your calendar before reading this book.

Seriously. Once you start, you won’t want to have to put it down.

Last week at the Catholic Writers Guild meeting, I had the pleasure of meeting the author (and publisher) of Stealing Jenny. Ellen Gable is as generous with hugs as she is with advice to aspiring authors, and this novel (her best one yet, in this reader’s opinion) shows that she is also masterful at creating suspense.

I’ve enjoyed Ellen’s other novels:  In Name Only and Emily’s Hope–and I look forward to her upcoming book A Subtle Grace, scheduled for publication late this year.

But it’ll be tough to top this one. I’ll go a little sensational with my synopsis, because this story really does sound like it could be the Big Story on Action News, Ripped From the Headlines and all of that.

A young mother with a history of complicated pregnancies anticipates the birth of her child–but so does her neighbor, who harbors a deep grudge and plots to separate her, and her baby, from her happy family.

I don’t generally go for mystery, crime or suspense novels, but this one had me hooked.

(photo credit:  Little Brother. Do you know how many pictures he had to take before he got one without a blurry title? The kid is a perpetual motion machine–a bad quality in a photographer.)