Brotherhood and Baron

Jerry Jenkins is famous for the best-selling Left Behind series he wrote with Tim LaHaye.

But some of his best stories are about cops and robbers.

He recently has come out with The Brotherhood, which tells how a rookie Chicago cop named Boone Drake loses his wife and baby in a tragic fire. Drake gets angry with God, and then he grows in his faith in Christ in response to his trials and suffering. Yet he doesn't live happily ever after as he endures more trials.

Jenkins has law enforcement in his genes, along with a journalistic strain. His brothers and cousins and uncles are cops, so he brings a realistic touch to this story.

Before he was famous for the Left Behind stories, he wrote a fun four-part series on Jennifer Grey, a Chicago newspaper reporter. She was a young widow who trusted the Lord to get crime story scoops on her big city competitors.

Jenkins has written more than 150 books, and he wrote the Gil Thorp comic strip for several years. But he is a relatively young man at age 61. So his best may be yet to come.

For young readers

Out of Canada and Holland, through Pella, Iowa, Inheritance Publications has been pouring out solid, biblical stories for young people for many years.

The publishing house takes classic stories, often in Dutch, and translates them into English. Most of the stories are about the suffering of believers in times of persecution and war. Sometimes it is Huguenots fleeing France, or the persecution by the Spanish in Holland, or the Covenanters being persecuted in Scotland.

The latest book includes three Huguenot stories that explain how France tragically killed or exiled some of its finest citizens. In The Baron of Salgas, Sabine Malplach gives a moving account of a Huguenot family split up, the father sent to the galleys, and the wife escaping to exile in Geneva. The children are forced into convents and monasteries to be brought up as Roman Catholics.

Like so many of the Inheritance Publications books, this one has the page-turning drama of the Hardy Boys for young men, or John Grisham for adults. These plots are mixed with a little romance and some very serious issues, including justification by faith alone and religious liberty.