In his break-out novel DESCENT, Tim Johnston told the heart-pounding tale of a family on summer vacation in the Colorado Rockies who experience the unthinkable when Caitlin and Sean Courtland, 18 and 15, go up the mountain, but only Sean comes back down.
In his follow-up, THE CURRENT, Johnston delivered the spellbinding story of two violent drownings, ten years apart, and the Minnesota town that must reckon with the return of Dan Young, the prodigal son once accused of the first young woman’s murder.
Both Sean Courtland and Dan Young end up on the road, seeking distance, repair—perhaps even justice, though what form it will come in they do not know.
In DISTANT SONS, the two young men meet by chance in a small Wisconsin town, and this encounter offers them both the possibility of a community, and genuine friendship, they haven’t dared imagine for themselves. But there’s danger, too, and the specters of violence that sent them roving are never far behind. Indeed it may be their pasts, and their very presence in the town, which drags them grimly into a decades-old mystery—the disappearance of three boys in the 1970’s—and triggers the violent events to come.
With its fateful crossing of paths, DISTANT SONS unites the three novels in one expansive world reminiscent of the mythic sagas of McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove series and McCarthy’s Border Trilogy. Johnston’s myths are as urgent as the day’s headlines and his canvas is the central United States, from the vertiginous Rocky Mountains to the slow crawl of the Mississippi—a heartland trilogy whose central themes of mystery, trauma, and survival never overshadow the humanity of its characters and the relationships that sustain and redeem them.
Book by book, Johnston has staked out his own territory of literary suspense, crafting immersive, page-turning stories with breathtaking beauty and heart. Taken altogether, his trilogy delivers a tour-de-force of American lives and landscape—bountiful, thrilling, unforgettable.
