In the unforgiving wilds of colonial North Carolina, a preacher’s daughter learns that the most dangerous sins are born of compassion.

The year is 1750, and for seventeen-year-old Sarah Mason, life is a quiet rhythm of scripture, duty, and the rigid expectations of her father’s flock in the small port of Moyock. Her world is bound by the laws of God and the unyielding authority of the British Crown, two forces she has never thought to question.

But when a torrential storm casts a grievously wounded runaway slave named Joshua at the edge of her family’s land, Sarah’s world of scripture and quiet duty is shattered. The man’s back is a brutal canvas of suffering, and his spirit is nearly broken. To turn him in is to condemn him to certain death. To help him is to defy the law, her father, and her entire community.

Haunted by the man’s suffering and guided by a faith more compassionate than the law allows, Sarah makes a perilous choice. She hides Joshua in the shadows of the Great Dismal Swamp, a place of dark legends and treacherous beauty, risking everything she holds dear to nurture him back to health.

Her act of mercy does not go unnoticed. The arrival of Magistrate Nathaniel Flora, an iron-willed magistrate determined to make an example of any who defy the Crown, transforms her small town into a landscape of whispers and suspicion. Now an outcast, Sarah is forced to navigate a treacherous double life, where every trip for food is a dance with discovery and every friendly face could mask a betrayer.

With the magistrate's net tightening and a web of spies closing in, Sarah and Joshua are driven from their fragile sanctuary into the heart of the swamp itself. Their only hope lies on the far side of the wilderness, on the banks of a distant river where freedom is just a rumor. But their pursuers are relentless, and in a world where mercy is a crime, faith may not be a guide, but a death sentence.

The Preacher's Daughter and the Runaway is a powerful and atmospheric historical tragedy that explores the devastating cost of compassion and the unshakeable resilience of the human spirit in the face of brutal injustice. Perfect for fans of The Underground Railroad and The Four Winds.