New York Times bestselling and award-winning author Tim Johnston will launch his new novel, The Current, a tour de force about the indelible impact of a crime on the lives of innocent people. The novel has been called “a gripping thriller and page-turner but also a masterwork of mood and language.” Johnston will be interviewed by longtime journalist and local crime novelist Andrew Welsh Huggins.
In the dead of winter, outside a small Minnesota town, state troopers pull two young women and their car from the icy Black Root River. One is found downriver, drowned, while the other is found at the scene—half frozen but alive. What happened was no accident, and news of the crime awakens the community’s memories of another young woman who lost her life in the same river ten years earlier, and whose killer may still live among them. Determined to find answers, the surviving young woman soon realizes that she’s connected to the earlier unsolved case by more than just a river, and the deeper she plunges into her own investigation, the closer she comes to dangerous truths, and to the violence that simmers just below the surface of her hometown.
Grief, suspicion, the innocent and the guilty—all stir to life in this cold northern town where a young woman can come home, but still not be safe. Brilliantly plotted and unrelentingly propulsive, The Current is a beautifully realized story about the fragility of life, the power of the past, and the need, always, to fight back.
Tim Johnston, a native of Iowa City, is the author of the New York Times bestseller Descent, as well as a young adult novel, Never So Green, and the story collection Irish Girl, winner of the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction. Tim’s stories have also appeared in New England Review, The Iowa Review, The Missouri Review, and Narrative Magazine, among others.
Andrew Welsh-Huggins is a longtime criminal justice writer and editor with the Associated Press in Columbus. An expert on capital punishment, he’s authored No Winners Here Tonight, the definitive history of Ohio's death penalty, and Hatred at Home, about one of the country's first domestic terrorism cases. Welsh-Huggins has authored six Andy Hayes mysteries published by Swallow Press. With Akashic Books, he’s the editor of the upcoming Columbus Noir.
