Tim Johnston (1)

Descent is a harrowing story about a family searching for a daughter that has disappeared. The girl disappears on a summer vacation, kidnapped, in the Rocky Mountains and the family that's left, the father, mother and brother must go on with their lives not knowing where she is, if she is still alive...

This book hit me pretty hard. I had it for ages on my Ipad, but the time never really came for me to read it until now when I saw that it would be released, then I thought "what the heck, I show more read it, who knows it could be good". It was harrowing to read the family's agonizing search. The father Grant who stayed and searched, the mother Angela who in the end returned home but never really could go on living, the son Sean who finally left them and lived in his car and worked for gas money just driving around...

In the end, I just want to say that Tim Johnston has written a marvelous book, very beautiful written about the evil things men do. In many ways this is so much worse than paranormal horror because things like this happen, children disappear, some are found and some are never found. I cared deeply for the family and I even came to care very much for a character that I never really liked until in the very end, then he did something that made me actually get tearful and I seldom cry when I read books.

I recommend this book warmly!

I received this copy from the publisher through NetGalley in return for an honest review! show less

I don’t know why I assume every book I love will be loved by everyone else. Take this book—Descent. You’ve got the Rockies, compelling characters, and a mystery with a twist at the end—spun by a master story-teller. This is beautiful writing at a perfect pace. So when Kirkus Reviews tells you it’s an “…overwritten yet occasionally poignant tale,” I want you to remember you heard it here first. A MUST READ!

I've read two other novels by Tim Johnston and liked them both, but this one, DISTANT SONS, is his best. It kept me up reading long past my bedtime, and when I sat down to eat, this book came with me. There's a lot going on here, the best kind of mystery, with more than one mystery.

The main character in DISTANT SONS is 26-year-old Sean Courtland, who was the teenage son in Johnston's book DESCENT. He is now a wandering carpenter and has found work where he stopped accidentally. Courtland has show more contracted for a job in the home of Marion Devereaux, long suspected by some of murdering three boys 40-some years ago. Devereux also has an uncle, now gone, no one knows where.

Another mystery comes with Dan Young, a 29-year-old man who Courtland meets and who ends up working on Devereaux's job with him. Young is from Minnesota and has no vehicle or phone.

As a result of Courtland's experience with his sister in DESCENT, he now sometimes defends women who are victims of men. This is how he meets Denise Givins, a waitress. He gets in a fight with a man who is hassling Givens. And that man doesn't go away; more trouble awaits.

Johnston is not only a great storyteller; he's also a wonderful writer. He's so good you'll even want to read his descriptive paragraphs, the parts you might skip in another book. For example, Johnston doesn't just say, "It was a nice day." He describes the day, simply but beautifully.

This book is a keeper. Loan it but don't give it away. show less

Because it was only girls… In the river. It’s always been only girls.


The Current is not your ordinary mystery/thriller; in fact, I would strongly discourage those who enter its icy, frozen Minnesotan (and Iowan) world to read it solely for the mystery, or else dissuade altogether those looking for a fast-paced thriller.



What Johnston has written instead are immensely literary and exceedingly woeful, harrowing character studies of those who are trapped in present and past show more traumas—all of which collide when one college girl is assaulted on the way home to visit her dying father, the town’s ex-sheriff, and she and her friend go into the icy river. The opening chapter depicting this scene is claustrophobic and written so close-to-the bone that it’s hard not to keep reading when the book then splits into different characters—often simply beginning chapters with pronouns, so that it takes the reader a few pages to disengage from what came before and orient his or her way toward what’s taking place now, and with whom.

Johnston’s true skill here is his prose: this is masterfully written, almost with echoes of McCarthy, Robinson, Sam Michel, Schutt, Faulkner, and others, yet all the while in Johnston’s own undeniable voice. The prose is what carries one through the bleak world of The Current, and Johnston’s versatility is centerstage when moving between past and present, showing how interrelated they are for people stuck in their own individual traumas. I was very often awed by some passages’ abilities to evoke, to suggest, to reveal the deep winter in which the story takes place as it mirrors so acutely the characters’ dark interior worlds:


Did it fade with time, with age? Or did the thing you fought inside yourself just grow bigger, hungrier, until it took you over?

If this book doesn’t leave you feeling frozen, like you’ve been stuck in an ice-cold river in a Minnesotan storm, I would be shocked, floored. And if this book doesn’t leave you moved in terms of how it questions generational trauma, isolation, and sexual assault, then the tremendous empathy Johnston’s book holds up to the light of humanity is but a mirror for whatever demons you harbor inside you. show less