Vorab-RezensentenTim Johnston

Tim Johnston, whose breakout debut Descent was called "astonishing," "engulfing," and "outstanding" by national media, returns with The Current, a tour de force about the indelible impact of a crime on the lives of innocent people. In the dead of winter, outside a small Minnesota town, state troopers pull two young women and their automobile from the icy Black Root River. One girl is found downriver, drowned, while the other is found at the scene, half-frozen and unconscious, but alive. What happened was no accident, and news of the crime awakens the community's memories of another young woman who lost her life in the same river ten years earlier, and whose killer may still live among them. Determined to find answers, the surviving girl soon realizes that she's connected to the earlier unsolved case by more than just a river, and the deeper she plunges into her own investigation, the closer she comes to dangerous truths, and to the violence that simmers just below the surface of her hometown. Brilliantly plotted, unrelentingly suspenseful, and richly atmospheric, The Current is a mesmerizing story about the fragility of life—and the power of fighting back.

Descent, the story of a family undone by the disappearance of a daughter who went out for a morning run and didn’t come back, marks the adult fiction debut of a remarkable young writer. Stunning in its emotional impact, Descent is a compulsively readable page-turner with a strong literary sensibility. The girl’s vanishing–on a sunny, late-summer vacation morning–all the more devastating for its mystery, is the beginning of the family’s harrowing journey down increasingly divergent and solitary paths, until all that continues to bind them to one another are the questions they can never bring themselves to ask: At what point does a family stop searching? At what point does a girl stop fighting for her life? In the weeks and months that follow, hope leads to disillusionment, and each of them–father, mother, son–withdraws into emotional isolation, individually assessing the blame and each assuming the responsibility for their collective loss. Haunting and unforgettable, Descent is a novel that will grab the reader’s heart and mind, and will linger there long after the last page is turned.