#BlogTour ‘The Distant Dead’ by Heather Young

About the book…

A body burns in the high desert hills. A boy walks into a fire station, pale with the shock of a grisly discovery. A middle school teacher worries when her colleague is late for work. When the body is identified as local math teacher Adam Merkel, a small Nevada town is rocked to its core by a brutal and calculated murder.

In the seven months he worked at Lovelock’s middle school, the quiet and seemingly unremarkable Adam Merkel had formed a bond with just one of his students: Sal Prentiss, a lonely sixth grader who lives with his uncles on a desolate ranch in the hills. It is Sal who finds Adam’s body, charred almost beyond recognition, half a mile from his uncles’ compound.

Nora Wheaton, the school’s social studies teacher, sensed a kindred spirit in Adam – another soul bound to Lovelock by guilt and duty. After his death, she delves into his past for clues to who killed him. Yet, the truth about Adam’s murder may lie closer to home. For Sal’s grief seems shaded with fear, and Nora suspects he knows more than he’s telling about his favourite teacher’s death.

This unforgettable thriller brings a small American town to vivid life, filled with complex, troubled characters wrestling with the weight of the past, the promise of the future and the bitter freedom that forgiveness can bring.

Huge thanks to Anne Cater from Random Things Blog Tours for the tour invite and publishers Verve Press/No Exit for my e-arc of ‘The Distant Dead’ which is out as a ebook on 18th March, and print edition on 22nd July.

This is an elegaic exploration of the transition from boy to man, the nature of the weight of grief and belonging. There are comparisons to be drawn between the young boy in the prologue, in prehistoric times investigating a cave, exploring his inner darkness with the aim of becoming a man, and Sal, the motherless boy living with two uncles who supply his town with ‘medicine’. Both are lost, figuratively and literally, one falling into eternal darkness after being scared by bats, forever missed by his family to whom his disappearance is a mystery, and the other, a child haunted by loss and light up by the fire which immolates his favourite teacher.

Each of the characters who narrates ‘The Distant Dead’ are dealing with loss and love in their own way-Sal is a teenage boy whose social circumstances mark him out as one of the ‘weirdos’, Nora, the social studies teacher is trapped in a town she meant to leave and never return to, by the actions of her father who killed her brother in the same car crash that paralysed him.

They seem to exist in a stupor which is exemplified by the arrival of a teacher from a prestigious university, an object of curiosity to all in the town of Lovelock . The townsfolk anticipate a worldly wise person and instead get this grey, buttoned up grief stricken who buries himself in the mathematical formulas which prove there can be order to the universe.

The shock of his horrific murder sets the town alight. From the boy who found him-just what was Sal doing up on the mountain at that time of the morning?-to the teacher who feels his loss so keenly, to Jake, the fire department volunteer who is determined to work out what happened, all of them are not only shocked out of a stupor they never realised they were in, but are also forced to face head on the fact that the dead are never really distant. They are only distant when you stop thinking about them.

I very much enjoyed this book, it renders the reality of small town life which, no matter where in the world it is located, has the same familiar tropes which contribute to the way people live. A slow burn whodunnit which repays the patient reader with a most satisfying reading experience, this may appear like a whodunnit, but the facts of Mr Merkel’s death are a catalyst for more than just bringing the culprit to justice.

About the author…

Heather is the author of two novels. Her debut, ‘The Lost Girls‘, won the Strand Award for Best First Novel and was nominated for an Edgar Award.

‘The Distant Dead‘ was published on June 9, 2020, and was named one of the Best Books of Summer by People Magazine, Parade, and CrimeReads.

A former antitrust and intellectual property litigator, she traded the legal world for the literary one and earned her MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars in 2011. She lives in Mill Valley, California, where she writes, bikes, hikes, and reads books by other people that she wishes she’d written.

Links-http://www.heatheryoungwriter.com/

Twitter @RTTours @Verve_Books @HYoungAuthor