The Trouble With Strangers: A Christian friendship comedy (The Murphy Girls Book 6)

Five women drive up a mountain for one weekend of enforced stillness. When the bridge washes out, how long before the worst week of their lives becomes the best thing that ever happened to them?

Sophie booked the early checkout before she arrived. Jenna guards a box she will not open. Brooke has a critical path on a cabinet door. Kate is twenty, cold, and would rather be anywhere. Claire wants everyone to be friends immediately and will not be discouraged.

They are strangers. They have nothing in common. They are about to be stuck together for eleven days.

The rain does not stop. The road is gone. The lodge’s expensive coffee urn dies on the fourth day and is replaced, permanently, by an ugly dented percolator that will not.

Then the bunks start failing, the stew scorches, a raccoon named Bartholomew opens a campaign against the pantry, and somebody has to stand on a wet ridge in the dark holding the only bar of signal on the mountain. Which means, absurdly, that five women who did not want to know each other need each other’s phone numbers.

Sophie makes the group chat. She is very clear that it is a logistics tool and not a friendship.

She names it Murphy’s Law, because everything that can go wrong has.

What none of them notice — not that night, and not for years — is that they have accidentally named a testimony. Because the joke is only half the sentence. And the half nobody said out loud is the part that has been quietly doing all the work.

This is where it started. The chat. The percolator. The five of them.

The Trouble With Strangers is a Christian friendship comedy and the sixth book in The Murphy Girls series — the prequel to Sophie’s story, clean, Christ-centered, and best read after the others.