Review: The Distant Dead

The Distant Dead by Heather Young
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Set in a small town in Nevada, The Distant Dead follows young Sal Prentiss, a boy who reports having found a body up on a hill near his uncles' property one morning on the way to school. The body turns out to be the burned remains of Sal's math teacher, Adam Merkel, one of the only people who had shown the boy kindness at his local school. Merkel's work colleague Nora Wheaton, a social studies teacher resentfully stuck at the school her mother used to teach at so that she can care for her ailing father, tries to unravel the mystery of what happened to the man she tried to befriend. Who would have killed this gentle-seeming man, whose love of mathematics made such an impression on Sal and other students? Against this backdrop of murder, nefarious dealings seem to haunt the Prentiss family, where Sal's uncles, Ezra and Gideon, seem locked in a battle that has them ignoring their dead sister's son. Was the strange young man from Merkel's past the killer? Were the Prentiss men? How did such a gruesome fate befall a man who had just moved to this small community?

With crushing inevitability, Young masterfully guides the reader to the events that led to Merkel's demise. This is a beautifully written novel with characters who will linger in your mind long after you put down the book. Exploring small-town life, substance abuse, and the struggle of loss, The Distant Dead is one of the best novels of suspense that I've read in quite some time.

The audiobook, narrated by Charlie Thurston, Jim Meskimen, Eva Kaminsky & Cassandra Campbell, is terrific.

I received a digital review copy from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

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