The water keeper

Martin (The Mountain Between Us; Long Way Gone) excels at writing characters who exist in the margins of life. Murphy Shepherd lives alone, doing maintenance work for a church that no one attends and trying to heal from scars gained rescuing others who dwell in the margins. His specialty is finding trafficked young girls and leading them from brokenness to freedom, but Shepherd thinks he has given everything he has and it may be time to retire. His hermetic healing process is interrupted when he rescues a woman named Summer in Florida's Intercoastal Waterway and gets drawn into a hunt after a gang of international human traffickers. The strength of the story is in the friends he picks up along the way: a dying ex-con, an intelligent Labrador, and a hardened young girl with as many secrets as Shepherd himself. VERDICT Martin deftly unwinds Shepherd's backstory in between high-octane chase scenes. Readers who enjoy flawed yet likable characters created by authors such as John Grisham and Nicholas Sparks will want to start reading Martin's fiction.--Christine Barth, Scott Cty. Lib. Syst., IA