As elegant as the Sacramento residence she operates, Isabelle Labrie keeps her past concealed, like the treasure she hides under the Golden Hotel. It’s 1853, the heyday of the California Gold Rush. Isabelle is full of hope, staking her claim on the city’s refined clientele and her future on a sweetheart’s promise to marry her when he returns from the gold fields. Then, unexpected guests—fugitive slaves seeking safe passage to the North—force her to confront her past and reconsider her path.

While Isabelle learns to trust God’s provisions, a law student in Virginia must confront his father’s cruelty and rescue a young slave from his family’s tobacco plantation. As the two escape to freedom, and Isabelle risks everything to harbor runaway slaves, the past and present are set on an inevitable collision course—one that reveals hidden treasures of the heart.

Melanie Dobson has written fifteen historical, romance, and suspense novels—including Chateau of Secrets and Shadows of Ladenbrooke Manor—and three of her novels have won Carol Awards. Her first Underground Railroad novel, Love Finds You in Liberty, Indiana, won Best Novel of Indiana in 2010, and The Black Cloister was named Foreword Magazine’s Religious Fiction Book of the Year in 2008.

“My desire,” Melanie says, “is that the stories God has etched in my heart will give readers a glimpse of His love and grace, even when they don’t understand His plan.”

The former corporate publicity manager at Focus on the Family and owner of Dobson Media Group, Melanie now writes full-time. She and her husband, Jon, and their two daughters live near Portland, Oregon, where they enjoy hiking and camping on the coast and in the mountains of the Pacific Northwest. When she isn’t hiking, practicing yoga, or reading with her girls, Melanie loves to explore old cemeteries and ghost towns.