The Distant Dead by Heather Young
I would like to thank Anne from Random Tours and Verve Books for an advance copy of this novel in exchange for a fair and honest review.
Publisher – Verve Books
Published – Out Now
Price - £20 hardback £4.99 Kindle eBook
A body burns in the high desert hills. A boy walks into a fire station, pale with the shock of a grisly discovery. A middle school teacher worries when her colleague is late for work. By day’s end, when the body is identified as local math teacher Adam Merkel, a small Nevada town will be rocked to its core by a brutal and calculated murder.
Adam Merkel left a university professorship in Reno to teach middle school in Lovelock seven months before he died. A quiet, seemingly unremarkable man, he connected with just one of his students: Sal Prentiss, a lonely sixth grader who lives with his uncles on a desolate ranch in the hills. The two outcasts developed a tender, trusting friendship that brought each of them hope in the wake of tragedy. But it is Sal who finds Adam’s body, charred almost beyond recognition, half a mile from his uncles’ compound.
Nora Wheaton, the middle school’s social studies teacher, dreamed of a life far from Lovelock only to be dragged back on the eve of her college graduation to care for her disabled father, a man she loves but can’t forgive. She sensed in the new math teacher a kindred spirit--another soul bound to Lovelock by guilt and duty. After Adam’s death, she delves into his past for clues to who killed him and finds a dark history she understands all too well. But the truth about his murder may lie closer to home. For Sal Prentiss’s grief seems heavily shaded with fear, and Nora suspects he knows more than he’s telling about how his favorite teacher died. As she tries to earn the wary boy’s trust, she finds he holds not only the key to Adam’s murder, but an unexpected chance at the life she thought she’d lost.
Weaving together the last months of Adam’s life, Nora’s search for answers, and a young boy’s anguished moral reckoning, this unforgettable thriller brings a small American town to vivid life, filled with complex, flawed characters wrestling with the weight of the past, the promise of the future, and the bitter freedom that forgiveness can bring.
Guilt is a key part of a thriller. We want to know who caused the crime that the story centres around, but guilt isn’t just an emotion for the prime suspect. We all carry our pasts with us; our mistakes and their consequences for us and others. Guilt whispers on our shoulders and influences future decisions to avoid repeating history. In the excellent The Distant Dead by Heather Young a small town in Nevada is rocked by a out of the ordinary horrific death and those impacted by the death find their own pasts haunt them as the investigation continues.
Lovelock is a very small town surrounded by the Nevada countryside where everyone knows each other’s life story pretty well. The middle school gets a new Maths tutor the strange Adam Merkel (nicknamed the turtle by his classes) – reserved, quiet, and yet on occasion can be dazzlingly brilliant on his subject. A man with a past but no one is too sure what it is. On Pi day he was expected to arrive with desserts for classes and he doesn’t show up. Eventually Sal Prentiss reports finding a burnt body out in deserted ranch land that is finally identified as Adam. Sal a lonely child himself recovering from the unexpected death of his mother had finally started to find friendship with the awkward Adam and is shook by the event. Adam’s only other known friend was Nora Wheaton a Lovelock resident since birth who reluctantly has stayed in the town and found her new maths teacher a similar ally and is rocked by his death and wants to know why anyone would have wanted to do this to him. Sal and Nora are going to rewind the last few months to try and work out what led to that event and will find many secrets in their lives coming back to finally be addressed.
This dark tale is enthralling. Young delivers a tale of death, secrets and guilt that feels often quite american gothic. Lovelock feels a town a million miles from anywhere full of its own awkward personal relationships but a tad timeless and yet this single event starts to make us see a town full of dark crimes and secrets. At the centre is the enigmatic Adam Merkel and in Nora’s and Sal’s flashbacks we unpeel the kind of teacher that the kids laugh at all the time to find an individual who is amazingly complicated – sympathetic and yet often alarming. The crimes that surround his death are haunting and beautifully woven into the narrative as we slowly realise how much Adam was hiding from the world. Putting all the pieces of his mysteries together gives the story a strong plot for the reader to latch onto.
That alone would have been fairly gripping but what makes the novel have an unexpected level of emotional depth is how we unpeel Sal and Nora’s lives as well. Nora takes the role of the investigator and as we unpeel a woman who was a rebellious child; a teenager dealing with family tragedies and then someone who has ended up chaining herself to living in her town caring for her father someone who is very much stuck in her life. This case gives her something new to get into and yet also as she finds out more about Adam starts to make her re-evaluate her decisions. She is sympathetic and yet we feel this case for her is not really about justice for Adam but someone putting their own ghosts to rest which makes her much more than the staid schoolteacher she now likes to present herself like to the wider world.
In contrast and the most standout character is eleven-year-old Sal. Sal is the kind of child no one will remember in class - a solid C grade in most things and yet he watches silently and takes in everything and gets to the heart of what he sees too. In conversations with Adam the concept of a Watcher arrives someone who bears witness to the stories of others– Sal feels the perfect witness to Adam’s secret life and yet as we explore life for Sal we find so much more hidden. The mysterious death of his mother; his recent move to stay with two strange off the grid uncles and Sal’s unusual errands for them that uncover a much darker side to the town than we would expect. Young makes us consider the people the world tends to ignore and their own personal battles and experiences that most of us will be unaware of. Sal moves between from being just a witness to a key part of unlocking all the events of the night Adam died.
The last element that really elevated this was how Young gives the story which could have easily been a gritty crime tale into something a little eerier and mythic than I was expecting. Young mixes the myths of Nevada’s earlier inhabitants; principles of science and even the plot of Neil Gaiman’s the Graveyard Book to imbue the tale with symbolism and mystery. I got the feeling I wasn’t just watching a crime tale but yet another strange event in a land that has for thousands of years seen death and human pettiness repeat itself in cycles. This is just one story in a land filled with them. Sal has created in his mind a personal imaginary world f avenging angels and demons and this seeps into the narrative offering advice or chastening his behaviour which again makes us feel this story has a touch of crossing into something stranger reaching a dramatic and painful finale.
The Distant Dead is a captivating thriller that is hard to predict and is also very much about making us see characters as human beings (with both good and bad elements co-existing together) rather than simple plot devices. Combined with a fascinating landscape and some truly dark and mythical writing it was a haunting read in the best way – as cold as a desert night in its examination of people’s failings yet with some human warmth to make us think about both compassion and guilt. Strongly recommended.
