You’ve found the home of the Costly Grace Series. We’re glad to see you here. Please take a minute to add yourself to our mailing list so that we can keep in touch. We’ll send you a sneak peak of Book One, and we promise not to share your email address with anyone. If you’re on Firefox, we’re having trouble getting the mailing list signup form to show there, so please bear with us.
So far, it’s just one book, Faces in the Window. More is coming, though, as we have found dear friends in our characters and we want to continue their story.
When we first conceived of these books, we hadn’t read much of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, but we had already encountered the idea of Costly Grace. We didn’t call it by that name, but we recognized it when we read about those who risked everything during the Holocaust to save lives. People like Corrie Ten Boom, Miep Gies, or Irena Sendler.
We first started talking about the possibility of writing this novel while traveling across the United States by train. And so perhaps it is no surprise that our novel opens with our main character, Franz Maedler, on his own journey by train. Only he is not traveling across the United States, but across Eastern Europe of 1942, a land laid waste by war. This first novel in our series is the story of Franz and his discovery of Costly Grace.
Book One: Faces in the Window
Inscript Publishing, 2022
Caught between his Nazi father and the memory of his devout mother, Franz must make a life-defining choice.
December 1942: Wounded in Stalingrad, Wehrmacht officer Franz Maedler is on his way home to Berlin. Haunted by memories of the men he left behind and the suffering he witnessed on the Eastern Front, he is no longer certain of where he stands. He is pulled between his father—a devoted National Socialist—and the memory of his Christian mother, between his brother Friedrich in military intelligence and his Christian girlfriend, and between his army oath to Hitler and his confirmation oath to Christ.
He wants to marry Katrin Weber, but she needs him to decide who he is—and whom he follows. Then his world is turned upside-down when he faces a life-defining decision. Franz, Katrin, and Friedrich could lose everything. And they are not the only ones. Franz can no longer straddle the divide. Will he choose the swastika or the cross?