THE WIDOW'S PRAYER

Seven days. A locked room. A child's prayer that brought down a plague. When Tony Vasques was seven years old, his mother did not come home. She had locked him in their rented room in Porto's Ribeira district before dawn, the way she did every day she went to clean the floors of a wealthy family's villa on the coast. By nightfall, the padlock was still shut, the room was dark, and Tony was alone. His mother, Elena—a young widow carrying the secret guilt of having wished her dying husband dead—had been kidnapped. Taken along with her employer's wife and son to an abandoned wine estate in the Douro Valley by a gang whose tentacles reached into the police, the banks, and the markets of Porto. Inside the cellar, Elena watches a young man die for his arrogance. She holds a broken woman through the aftermath of an unspeakable assault. And she confronts the guilt she has carried for three years—the guilt of a prayer she believes killed her husband. Inside the locked room, Tony kneels on the cold floor and prays. Not the polite prayers of a child mimicking adults. These are the prayers of a soul that has been cornered—raw, ferocious, aimed at heaven with the precision of a weapon. Within forty-eight hours, every man involved in the kidnapping—and every accomplice who enabled it—is struck by a plague of boils so severe that no medicine can touch it. By the seventh day, they are all dead. The Widow's Prayer is a heart-wrenching novel about guilt, faith, motherhood, and the terrifying power of a child's cry to God. Set against the golden light and dark corners of Porto, Portugal, it asks the question that every parent fears and every theologian debates: What happens when an innocent child's prayer calls down judgement? Perfect for readers of Room by Emma Donoghue, A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, and The Shack by William Paul Young.