Excellent.

Original.

Funny and entertaining.

A coming of age, murder mystery, ghost story.

If you told me this was written by Stephen King, I’d believe you. As with many King novels, it’s long. Perhaps too long.

The Weller is one of my favourite characters of fiction. A football / weight room jock, he’s the unlikely friend of our protagonist.

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Thrilled to find a new author I really admired … I was half way through the book before discovering Scott Carson is a pen name for one of my favourite writers — Michael Koryta.

His 2024 book is a ‘Love Letter’ to Bloomington, Indiana. The author was born and raised there.

This novel is set in 1999.

When a young woman disappears in his small town, the investigation hinges on 16-year-old Marshall Miller’s haunted sighting of her, crying in the back seat of a police car driven by a cop named Maddox.

There’s only one problem: no local cop named Maddox exists.

But the speeding ticket he handed to Marshall certainly does.

Dealing with police and media is heady stuff for a teenager, the son of a single mother, but Marshall is sure he can handle it, until the shocking day when his reliability as a witness implodes.

Now scorned and shamed, he finds unlikely allies as he confronts the ancient secrets behind his small town’s peaceful façade—and learns the truth about his own family.

Amazon