The Distant Dead

March 16, 2020
The discovery of a charred corpse outside Lovelock, Nev., drives this moving psychological thriller from Young (The Lost Girls). Middle school social studies teacher Nora Wheaton has deferred her dream of exploring the world as an anthropologist to care for her father, who’s partially disabled after drunkenly crashing his truck and killing her older brother 13 years earlier. Precocious recently orphaned sixth grader Sal Prentiss, who finds the body, has only a pair of menacing and possibly criminal uncles standing between him and foster care. Flashbacks reveal that the victim, former university professor Adam Merkel, was reduced to teaching math at the middle school—where he befriended fellow outcast Sal—for unknown reasons. Through the course of the murder investigation, in which Nora, Sal’s teacher, assists, Young gradually reveals her characters’ complicated pasts while skillfully building suspense. Never mind a tad too much symmetry in some of the backstories. This emotionally resonant saga, firmly rooted in the high desert hills, will keep readers turning the pages. Agent: Michelle Brower, Aevitas Creative Management.

April 15, 2020
Lonely, broken people in a dead-end town are forced to confront the fragility of life and relationships in the aftermath of a horrific death. A young boy, Sal Prentiss, discovers a burned corpse in the lonely hills of a small Nevada town, soon revealed to be that of Adam Merkel, the middle school math teacher, a new arrival who came--and died--carrying a lot of secrets. Though few mourn his passing, nearly everyone in town seems to be struggling with their own frustrations and losses, from Nora Wheaton, the history teacher who tends her ailing father, unable to confront him about his role in her brother's death years ago, to Sal, who lost his mother to a drug overdose the year before. As each one makes choices that will direct the courses of their own lives and those of so many others, they also work to find out more about Adam's death and what events had brought him to their town: the intersections of the lives that led to his death. Playing out against the barren landscape of a struggling town, all this drama is worthy of a Greek tragedy, and there is also something tragic in the scope and depth of the characters' hubris and personal struggles. Young clearly has a gift for crafting complex, flawed protagonists and creating both empathy and understanding for them, but it takes a true master to also build empathy for minor characters, who would be so easy to leave in two dimensions. When a middle school bully, in teasing a teacher, becomes the target of that teacher's anger, the way Young reveals the root of the boy's cruelty, and vulnerability, suddenly reverses everything we thought we knew. And this small example, magnified, represents the brilliance of the novel: It is at heart about the timelessness of human curiosity, the eternal possibility of forgiveness, and the everyday miracle of survival. Electrifying, ambitious, and crushingly beautiful.

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Starred review from April 15, 2020
This second stunning piece of redemptive fiction from the author of the Edgar-nominated The Lost Girls (2017) puts a young boy at the center of a murder mystery and surrounds him with adults grappling with stinging regrets, karmic debts, and unresolved guilt over the loved ones they have lost. Finely woven into the narrative is a profound consideration of the transience of life, as the contemporary characters are revealed in subtle contrast to the ancient peoples who shared their same small spot in Nevada's Great Basin, later a wagon stop for settlers on their way to California that now accommodates the unsettled. The burned body of local math teacher Adam Merkel is found in the high desert hills by Sal Prentiss, a misfit sixth-grader who lives on a remote ranch with his uncles. Sal struggles under an incredible weight of secrets, which he carries around with an amazing, albeit oddly fantastical, perspicacity in an undernourished body. And what he carries around in his battered blue backpack is at the heart of the story. Nora Wheaton, the school's social-studies teacher, sees in Merkel the same haunted sadness caused by heartbreaking, life-altering tragedy that she finds in her own reflection. Her search for the truth amid passages of almost unbearable poignancy make this an ideal recommendation for fans of Kate Atkinson and Jodi Picoult.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)