Tim Johnston – författare

Inside Tim Johnston's ""Irish Girl"", readers will find spellbinding stories of loss, absence, and the devastating effects of chance - of what happens when the unthinkable bad luck of other people, of other towns, becomes our bad luck, our town. Taut, lucid, and engrossing, provocative and dark - and often darkly funny - these stories have much to offer the lover of literary fiction as well as the reader who just loves a great story.

“Read this astonishing novel . . . The magic of his prose equals the horror of Johnston’s story.” —The Washington Post The Rocky Mountains have cast their spell over the Courtlands, who are taking a family vacation before their daughter leaves for college. But when Caitlin and her younger brother, Sean, go out for an early morning run and only Sean returns, the mountains become as terrifying as they are majestic. Written with a precision that captures every emotion, every moment of fear, as each member of the family searches for answers, Descent races like an avalanche toward its heart-pounding conclusion. “A compelling thriller that is both creepy and literary . . . Descent is not just a mystery. It is an emotional story of evil, fear, acceptance and irony.”—The Denver Post “What makes the novel unforgettable is its sense of character, its deliberate, unadorned prose and Johnston’s unflinching exploration of human endurance, physical and psychological.” —Miami Herald “A super-charged, addictive read.” —The Missourian “An original and psychologically deep thriller.” —Outside magazine “Outstanding . . . The days when you had to choose between a great story and a great piece of writing? Gone.” —Esquire “[A] dazzling debut . . . Exquisitely crafted.” —The Dallas Morning News “Incredibly powerful, richly atmospheric.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune “[An] engulfing thriller-cum-western.” —The New York Times Book Review “Brilliant . . . As gripping as any Everest expedition.” —Peter Heller, author of The Dog Stars

"A first-rate thriller . . . Past and present merge in The Current, Tim Johnston's atmospheric, exquisitely suspenseful novel of two murders separated by ten years." —The Washington Post “Gripping . . . Johnston’s 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 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 young woman 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. 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.

WHAT IF?What if Sean Courtland's old Chevy truck had broken down somewhere else? What if he'd never met Denise Givens, a waitress at a local tavern, and gotten into a bar fight defending her honour? Or offered a ride to Dan Young, another young man like Sean, burdened by secrets and just drifting through the small Wisconsin town?Instead, Sean enlists Dan's help with a construction job in the basement of a local-the elderly, reclusive Marion Devereaux-and gradually the two men come to realize that they've washed up in a place haunted by the disappearance of three young boys decades earlier. As Sean and Dan's friendship deepens, and as Sean gets closer to Denise and her father, they come to the attention of a savvy local detective, Corrine Viegas, who has her own reasons for digging into Dan's past-and for being unable to resist the pull of the town's unsolved mystery. And with each chance connection, an irreversible chain of events is set in motion that culminates in shattering violence and the revelation of long-buried truths.Gripping and immersive, this crime novel by bestselling author Tim Johnston becomes so much more: a book about friendship and love and good hard work-and a masterful read about how the most random intersection of lives can have consequences both devastating and beautiful.

By the New York Times bestselling author of Descent and The Current, an absorbing new work of literary suspense about two young working men who forge a friendship despite secrets in their past, and whose actions ignite the passions and violence of a small Wisconsin town still haunted by the unsolved disappearance of three boys in the 1970s. For readers of Peter Heller, Liz Moore, and Cormac McCarthy.What if?What if Sean Courtland's old Chevy truck had broken down somewhere else? What if he'd never met Denise Givens, a waitress at a local tavern in the Wisconsin town where he lands? Or Dan Young, another young man like Sean drifting through, having fled Minnesota for reasons unknown? Instead, together Sean and Dan pick up carpentry and plumbing work for an old man named Marion Devereaux, and Sean gets drawn into the lives of Denise and her father-and of the townspeople, all haunted by the disappearance of three young boys decades ago, in the 1970s.As the paths of these characters converge, observing them all is Detective Corinne Viegas, a woman whose drive to seek justice comes from her father's own failure to find those boys and the violence once done to her sister. And over the course of just a few weeks, an irreversible chain of events is set in motion that culminates in shattering violence, and the revelation of long-buried truths.Evocative, gritty, with indelible characters and setting, Distant Sons is another immersive, gripping suspense novel by Johnston about how the most random intersection of lives can have consequences both devastating and beautiful.