When two women leave their college in the dead of winter for a 700-mile drive to Minnesota, they find themselves fighting for their lives in the icy waters of the Black Root River.
One girls survival, and the others murder stun the citizens of a small Minnesota town, thawing memories of another woman who lost her life in the same river, and whose killer may yet live among them.
A first-rate thriller .
Past and present merge in The Current , Tim Johnstons atmospheric, exquisitely suspenseful novel of two murders separated by ten years.
-- The Washington Post Gripping .
Johnstons masterful novel is worth lingering over--it soars above the constraints of a traditional thriller and pulls you deep into the secrets of a grief-stricken town.
-- People Tim Johnston, whose breakout debut Descent was called astonishing, dazzling, and unforgettable by critics, 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 car from the icy Black Root River.
One is found downriver, drowned, while the other is found at the scene -- half frozen but alive.
What happened was no accident, and news of the crime awakens the communitys 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 young woman soon realizes that shes 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.
Grief, suspicion, the innocent and the guilty--all stir to life in this cold northern town where a young woman can come home, but still not be safe.
Brilliantly plotted and unrelentingly propulsive, The Current is a beautifully realized story about the fragility of life, the power of the past, and the need, always, to fight back.
