Master storyteller Tim Johnston returns following his award-winning debut, Descent, with his latest literary fiction/suspense/murder mystery, THE CURRENT —beautifully haunting and atmospheric, an intense heartbreaking tale of two young women and an unsolved murder set in a small Midwestern town where the past and present collide.

I adore this author! Psychologically rich and character-driven, just when you think Tim Johnston could not possibly top his debut, he shocks us all. CAPTIVATING!

Two young women, Carolina Price (Georgia) and Audrey Sutter (Minnesota) meet at college in Memphis. Aubrey is upset when learning her dad (retired sheriff) has lung cancer (her mom died when she was seven) and wants to go home to be with him.

Caroline offers to drive her for the long road trip for the two gals. After around eleven hours, as they near the Iowa/Minnesota line, less than an hour to go, they stop for a bathroom break (a detour off the highway at an isolated gas station).

Caroline remains in the SUV while Aubrey goes to the restroom, and when she fails to return, Caroline goes looking for her and discovers outside the bathroom two men about to sexually assault her. Caroline intervenes and sprays them with mace, and they escape, shaken to the core, and make it back to the SUV.

Another issue: icy roads! Caroline loses control of the car. They are on the edge of a frozen river bank, holding their breath, and they think help is coming. However, when the truck approaches, thinking they are being rescued, the truck bumps them into the frozen river! Talk about nail-biting suspense! The river was frozen over!

This scene is chilling! One survives in the hospital, and one is pulled under the current with her body recovered weeks later. Was it road range or something else? Was it the guys back at the gas station out to get them?

Strangely, it is similar to a case of a decades-old murder of another young woman. CREEPY & terrifying! It's the same Black Root River. Ten years earlier, Holly Burke, about the same age as the girls, was stuck by a car and dumped into the river. No one was ever convicted of the murder.

Alternating between the past and present, the author expertly explores the girl's deaths and how the deaths affect the families.

Holly's father, Gordon
The family of Danny Young (suspect in Holly's murder)
Aubrey's father, Tom Sutter, Sherriff, was haunted by his failure to convict.

In addition, the girl left behind suffers survivor guilt and is determined to make sense of the cold case and the current one. She feels drawn as she had been in that river, too. One made it, and the other did not. What about the parents, the families?

From guilt and grief and a town and community divided. The Sheriff, no longer a sheriff with cancer, is determined to find the perpetrators before he dies to bring the killer to justice and protect these girls.

Johnston delivers an outstanding literary suspense thriller whodunit set in this small town with dark secrets. Immersive and gripping, his writing is breathtaking, with metaphors and symbolisms with an atmospheric backdrop of a frozen river full of grief, regret, love, hope, and healing! I highly recommend THE CURRENT, THE DESCENT, AND DISTANT SONS (currently reading).

For fans of Allen Eskens, William Kent Krueger, John Hart, Ron Rash and William Landay. (all favs)

Thanks to Algonquin Books and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review. I also purchased the hardcover copy.

Blog review posted @
JudithDCollins.com
@JudithDCollins.com | #JDCMustReadBooks
My Rating: 5 Stars +
Pub Date: 01/22/2019
Top Books of 2019

I loved this book and read it when it came out and rated it; however, I realized this evening I failed to post my review at the time (I had a lot going on in my life back then). I am reading Tim's upcoming Distant Sons and wanted to cross-link my reviews. WOW! Just wait until you read this one. You will enjoy Dan and Sean, whom we met in Descent and The Current.

Though I’m very late to reviewing this one, I really enjoyed it! It kept me interested, and I would recommend it to anyone who dabbles in this genre.

This was a good "slow burn" book. I struggled a bit with the way it was written, jumping from one decade to another without warning and using anonymous pronouns like "she" without clear reference. I struggled with this a great deal in the beginning...paging back to try to find my place in the story, who were the characters being referenced, etc., but it got a bit easier as time went by and I just relaxed and went with it. I'm not sure if the author used this as an intentional technique to keep the reader a little confused (if he did, it worked...lol!), but this did seem plausible as there were characters that were similar, that sort of morphed into one another as well, and from that lens it makes sense. Although I usually prefer a more straightforward narration, I can see the artistry in that as well. Overall, this was worth the effort, and I'm happy i didn't give up. Thank you NetGalley and publishers for providing a digital ARC for review.

If I didn’t know otherwise, I would have thought I was reading a Joyce Carol Oates book. Johnston’s writing has the same breathless, stream of consciousness introspection that is Oates’ signature. And there’s a very slight touch of the supernatural that is also reminiscent of Oates. Certainly, though, Johnston’s book stands on its own merits as a strongly written and very deep thriller.

The current, of course, refers to the river and the way it moves through and connects various locales, but in Johnston’s hands it also refers to an underlying spiritual current that connects humanity. Just like the currents in the water, the energy that flows between and among living beings circles and flows expanding the understanding of each character. This book is in no way a linear telling, switching from perspective and time without warning even in the midst of a paragraph. I actually really loved this way of telling a story…focusing more on the connections than the timeline.

The characters were finely drawn, as were the locations – especially the river. The plot moves between a murder ten years ago and a current one, both similarly involving a river drowning. The tense action is interspersed with the spiritual (but not religious), enriching both. The book held me in its grip and gave me a lot to think about as well as a keen appreciation for Johnston’s writing!

This book was a stunning triumph. I devoted an entire day to reading it and, despite its length, simply could not put it down. The prose is finely wrought, the characters fully realized—so much so that I grieved with and for them—and the plot is gripping.

This book is great! Would definitely recommend. Thanks so much to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

Gorgeous prose, beautiful written and character driven suspense. This is a stunningly good novel. It is hauntingly atmospheric, and lingers. Not for folks who want super high octane, this is a literary crime novel.

The Current was good, humanity-filled read. It explored the aspects of humans, feelings, and how people handle friendship and tragedy. It was suspenseful and intriguing. When a woman dies in an icy river but the other woman in the car only suffers a broken arm, questions start to pile up, especially when the same type of accident has happened before that was never solved. The way the story unfolds kept me hooked until the very end.

The Current is an engrossing story about the death of a young college-aged woman who had traveled with her close friend to visit the friend's dying father and the relationship between her death, the subsequent death of her friend's father and a death of another young girl a decade earlier. The author leaves subtle clues along the way as the dying father, a retired sheriff, tries to determine if the young woman was murdered and, if so, by whom. When he dies with the mystery still unsolved, his daughter picks up the investigation on her own - finding help from an unlikely ally - the father of the young girl who had been murdered a decade earlier and who blamed the now-deceased sheriff for failing to capture the perpetrator.
The author kept my interest from beginning to end, combining a fine mystery with insight into life in small town Minnesota.

The review below was posted on my blog on April 26, 2019, at https://www.thecuecard.com/books/the-current-and-the-perfect-nanny/

Tim Johnston’s crime mystery “The Current” starts off with two college girls on a long road trip home who suffer an attack at a gas station and whose car gets knocked from behind by an unidentified truck into the icy waters of a Minnesota river, drowning one and injuring the other. It’s an incident that rattles the nearby hometown of one of the girl’s, which endured a similar tragedy of a teenage girl dying in the river 10 years before. The recent survivor soon realizes there’s connections between the two cases and begins to poke around into the prior murder, which was pinned on a boy who was ultimately not charged.

Uh-oh. These kinds of icy, winter Minnesota mysteries are often hard for me to resist. And indeed I thought “The Current” had a more involved and better plot than the author’s 2015 acclaimed debut “The Descent,” which was a missing person, kidnap kind of story set in the mountains of Colorado. This one starts fast with the crime then turns into a slow burn of a novel about the injured girl and how other residents in her small hometown have been affected by the previous murder as they weathered years of suspicion, guilt, and grief. The accused boy and his family’s lives were changed forever as well as the lives of the victim’s family’s and the sheriff’s who was never able to get a conviction. Eventually the survivor girl is able to unravel enough secrets about that case and the town to get an arrest.

It’s a story, though while a slow burn, propelled me along quickly as I grappled with who and what were behind these crimes. It had a strong atmosphere of the town and the river, and the various characters felt like they had been through these tragedies. At times I wasn’t sure if the author was shooting for the novel to be literary fiction or crime fiction — it wavered between the two — as it went on at some length and manifested the various repercussions to the town folk. I liked it but thought it could’ve been edited shorter. The ending did not fully resolve both of the crimes, which didn’t bother me as I felt that that is often the case, but if that bugs you, be forewarned. I will continue to read whatever the author puts out next as I think his crime novels are compelling and seem to be getting better.

Thanks to Algonquin books for the e-galley they provided me for this review. It is posted on my blog at www.thecuecard.com.

Often when I really enjoy a book, I have a hard time reviewing it. I typically start out my reviews introducing the plot of the novel. But sometimes, things happen even early on that I want you as a reader to discover just as I did–while immersed in the text. On the other hand, how can I entice you to read an excellent story without telling you something about it?

There’s no way. I can tell you that The Current is about, among other things, the relationships between young adults and their parents, particularly young women and their fathers, and the transforming beauty of love. It looks at the longterm effects of grief and loneliness, and how sorrow and evil leave their mark on a tight-knit community. It is extremely well written, such that I have marked it both as “literary fiction” and “suspense,” which in my world is a perfect pairing! Johnston writes with deft hand, creating a world that is entirely our own while at the same time having elements of beauty and magic.

I feel that isn’t enough so I will give a little synopsis, but don’t blame me if you’d rather have found out the entire plot on your own. One fatal winter’s weekend, 2 young women, both 19, leave their college to drive one of them to her home in Iowa to visit her dying father. Their car ends up plunging into an ice-bound river, but it’s no accident. One survives, and as she heals, she is forced to contemplate the river, its treacherous ice, and the mystery of other girls who have gone into that same river before. The current takes life but also gives it; those who survive it have learned its secrets and can do so again.

10 years ago, another 19 year old girl went into the same river but did not come out. No one was ever arrested or charged with the crime. The surviving girl connects the two stories and begins to dig into the past, recognizing that justice for another is in one sense justice for herself as well, and others. But doing so may put her at risk once again, as buried secrets begin to surface.

You guys, I can’t do it justice. Suffice it to say that this is an excellent book–complex, layered and intense, beautiful in its telling and unflinching in its portrayal. Go read it. It’s so good.

While I hoped this story would be more suspenseful, I still really enjoyed this book! It was dark and full of heartache! The small town characters gave the readers a view into their grief and guilt. I think my favorite aspect was the window into how a small town feels towards an individual who has been suspected and cleared of a crime. And how the individual’s life is forever turned upside down. It gave me something to think about and to turn this thought toward real world experiences.

I greatly enjoyed the dialogue and felt it helped propel the story forward. Even though it took me awhile to get a hang of who everyone was. I overall really enjoyed this dark mystery and look forward to the authors next work!

This book was slow to start, I thought about giving up on it a few times. About halfway through, my interest increased and I finished the book. I was starting to like it more, but the ending leaving you with no answers which was frustrating.

Published by Algonquin Books on January 22, 2019

The lives of two young women, separated by more than a decade, intersect in The Current. One drowned in a river, but may have the victim of a crime before entering the water. Years later, the other woman nearly drowned in the same river. The second woman was a child when she saw the scene of the first woman’s death. Those fateful connections form the backbone of The Current, a literary crime novel that explores the impact of grief and resentment on characters who have little success coping with their losses.

Audrey Sutter (from Minnesota) and Caroline Price (from Georgia) are in their sophomore year at a Georgia college. Audrey needs to return home after learning her father, retired Sheriff Tom Sutter, is ill. Caroline impulsively decides to escape the magnified dramas of her life by driving Audrey home. Audrey is attacked in Iowa but Caroline rescues her from a probable sexual assault. Audrey and Caroline flee and are almost in Minnesota before ambiguous circumstances send the car into a river.

Gordon Burke’s daughter drowned in the same river years earlier. Burke has always carried a hatred for Sheriff Sutter for failing to arrest Danny Young, who was suspected of causing her death. That possibility ends Gordon’s relationship with Rachel Young (the widow of Gordon’s former business partner) and ends his friendship with Danny’s developmentally disabled brother Markey.

Much of the drama in the novel’s first half centers on Gordon, Tom, and Audrey. As the novel nears its midpoint, the focus shifts to Danny, who comes home to a town that does not welcome his return. Not even his old friend Jeff Goss, who appears to know more about the death of Gordon’s daughter than anyone except Danny, and who does not want Danny’s return to stir up the truth.

Palpable drama flows from a series of revelations as characters come to grip with new evidence of events that took place years earlier, as well as events surrounding the attack on Audrey. Characters are true to their midwestern small town roots, often struggling with emotions and frustrated by their sense of helplessness. Through dialog alone, without needless exposition, Tim Johnston conveys how difficult it is for Gordon to express himself.

As for the plot . . . I hate to use clichés like “riveting,” but I can’t think of a better word. The story is absolutely riveting, in part because the characters are so true-to-life and the description of their actions is so convincing. It’s a sad story but it’s sad because it rings true. It is a story of small town lives ruined by small men, men who “run all over the world like rats,” men who behave horridly and men who don’t speak up and put a stop to it.

Tension builds with such urgency in the second half that the book feels like a heavy weight pressing against the reader’s chest. The tension is created in part because of the story’s ambiguity. A man who might have attacked Audrey in Iowa faces extra-judicial punishment, but is he the guilty man? Another character is clearly guilty of certain crimes but is he responsible for Caroline’s death? Characters develop theories, they think they know what might have happened, but as is often true in life, nobody is really sure. They might convince themselves that they know, but in moments of honest reflection, they don’t know who is guilty and who is innocent. The story’s ambiguity reflects the real world, where so many crimes go unsolved and so many innocent people are falsely accused.

Ultimately, the story is about maintaining empathy in an uncertain world. Audrey feels the heart of Gordon’s daughter beating in her chest. Gordon once wished harm upon Audrey so her father would know the pain he felt, but when he gets to know Audrey, he understands how wrong he was to wish harm upon the innocent. The Current teaches the valuable lesson that justice and punishment are less important than understanding and healing.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Two young women, friends from a small Midwestern college, are pulled from the frigid winter waters of a Minnesota river, one dead and the other barely alive. The incident-which is no accident-recalls a similar tragedy 10 years earlier in the same Iowa town on the Minnesota border. The survivor, whose father is the former sheriff in the border Minnesota town, soon realizes their stories have deeper connections than just the river. Small towns with secrets is a territory that many writers employ, but Johnston takes his characters to a new level, fully realized characters, each filled with currents of love, regrets, and grief. Tim Johnston is a master at peeling back his carefully plotted story, one piece at a time. The Current is a sometimes bleak read, that will bring a feel of a Minnesota winter seem so real, you will want a fire, a quilt, and a cup of hot tea.



The Current had some moments of overwriting, in my opinion, and could have done with some skillful editing. I found myself trying to get through some of the back and forth and felt that some writing could have been omitted.



Overall, a four star book, and I will be reading more from Tim Johnston.



Thanks to #NetGalley and the publisher for a complimentary copy of the ebook in exchange for an honest review.

I very much enjoyed this mystery/ suspense novel about two college girls who met with misfortune on an icy road and landed in the current of a river. Although foul play is evident, there are no immediate suspects and very few clues. The author does a nice job of developing characters as he unravels the story using both the current case and similar historical case nearly 20 years ago. As Audrey recovers from the accident and begins to ask questions about what happened, the process of investigation helps her to understand the people from her childhood better - including her own father and some of the decisions he made. A great page turner for summer reading - highly recommended.

The Current by Tim Johnston - begins after two girls have been found in the river. One dead, the other severely hospitalized. Audrey, the surviving girl, starts asking questions as she desperately tries to figure out what happened to her and her friend Caroline that night. As the search for clues progresses, the small town is reminded of a similar incident occurring ten years prior. Another girl. Holly. Another body found dead in the river.

The timelines weave back and forth between the current investigation and the past incident. Secrets are uncovered and it appears that these two tragedies may be connected after all. Determined to uncover the truth, Audrey soon realizes she may be on the cusp of solving a decade old murder. Ending up in the river might not have been an accident at all...

I really enjoyed this one. The writing is just spectacularly haunting. Don’t let the cover fool you. This isn’t your fast-paced thriller. This is a literary novel that beautifully examines how tragedy has shaped the inhabitants of this town. The mystery unravels through exploration of each of the character's experiences in both past and present. This isn’t one to fly through. Sit down, take your time, and enjoy the journey that Johnston’s prose takes you on. // ☕️☕️☕️☕️☕️

Thank you Algonquin Books and NetGalley for the review copy. All opinions are my own.

I really enjoyed Tim Johnston’s first novel, Descent, so I couldn’t wait to dive into The Current. The book, a mystery wrapped in a study of the effects of grief on a small town, doesn’t start out with a bang, but more of a murmur. It sets up the tragedy nicely, perfectly framing a friendship and how easily and abruptly we can lose someone. College students Audrey Sutter and Caroline Price are not fond of each other when they’re paired as roommates, even going so far as to request different room assignments and avoiding each other as much as possible around campus. However, when they’re forced by circumstance to sit next to each other in a lit class, Caroline breaks their silence by turning to Audrey and asking for a pencil. From then on they’re inseparable. And so, when Audrey finds out her father Tom, the former sheriff of a tiny Minnesota town, is dying of cancer, she asks Caroline for a ride to the bus stop. The thought of Audrey riding a bus to go see her dying father is horrifying to Caroline, and besides, anything that tethers her to school, namely her boyfriend, is now an afterthought, so she offers to drive Audrey the 700 plus miles home.

An event at an icy rest stop sets the tone for what’s to come. When Audrey takes longer than she should in returning to the car, Caroline gets out into the frigid night to investigate.

And she looks again at the building, the large single window: the big gal sitting there as before, unquestionable owner of the sleeted-over wagon. All alone in there.



“Shit,” says Caroline, and she’s out of the car and moving fast through the sleet and she can hear them even before she rounds the corner,



“…there now, that’s better. See there, Bud? We’re all gonna be friends here.”



The one talking has got his hand on Audrey’s face, and Caroline registers in that first glance how dark the fingers look against her friend’s pale face, as if they’ve been dipped in paint, or oil—white hand but dark fingers—and how light her friend’s eyes are, even in that shadowed space. Audrey’s hair is a dark mess, tossed by some roughness, and the man has got a knee between her legs and has pinned one of her arms against the wall but her free hand hangs by her side, as if by some terrible gravity—has he broken her arm?

Caroline, tall and strong and powerful (not to mention a talented athlete) is not one to stand by and let anything happen to someone she loves. She maces one of the guys and all but dares the other to come after them so she can get a shot in at him. They make it back to their SUV, climb in, and are soon on a long icy slide down a hill, aimed straight for a bridge. They actually come to a stop without plummeting into the water, but headlights coming up behind them send them out onto the ice that covers the Black Root River, and it’s not strong enough to hold them.

Audrey survives with a broken arm, but Caroline doesn’t. Audrey sets out to find out who was in that car that pushed them into the river and left them for dead. Was it the two men that assaulted Audrey at the gas station? All Audrey remembers is seeing a truck that paused at the edge, then left, while she was hanging onto the RAV4 that was slowly sinking into the ice.

Johnston builds a complex web of menace and expertly weaves past and present together into a suspenseful, hypnotic, and compassionate story.

Meanwhile, her father can’t help but think about a case he never solved. Ten years ago, 19-year-old Holly Burke, who was found dead in that same river, and she was still alive before she went into the water. Her father, Gordon, still grieves for the daughter he lost, and can’t help but see parallels in Audrey and Caroline’s case. He also hasn’t let go of his anger over Tom’s failure to solve her case. There was a suspect named Danny Young, and a separate narrative covers the time directly after Holly’s death, and the aftermath of the suspicion cast on Danny. What does that have to do with the current case? Johnston builds a complex web of menace and expertly weaves past and present together into a suspenseful, hypnotic, and compassionate story. Johnston’s prose is lovely, and it carried me along much like a current might, but beware, there are plenty of rocks to watch out for.

If you enjoy books from Tana French and Kate Moretti, you’ll love Tim Johnston’s most recent book.

3.5 stars.

This was a tough one to rate.

On the positive side, Johnston has written an incredibly compelling story. Terrific premise, riveting complexity, and a fascinating cast of characters who motivate the reader to invest emotionally.

But...BUT. There were some very problematic loose ends that needed to be tied up at the conclusion of this book which were left dangling.

We had, essentially, two mysteries here. One was solved, and solved in a fascinating and satisfying manner. The other? We're left to wonder, which was frustrating and significantly lowered my overall opinion of the book. It renders a whole portion of the book seemingly futile, and that was disappointing.

I also could have done without the whole suffering, dying dog narrative. It's depressing and not particularly critical to the plot and really doesn't need to be there.

On the whole, I enjoyed this very much as I was reading it, but the conclusion (or lack thereof) made the book feel incomplete.

In Tim Johnston's The Current, this gripping novel will sweep you off your feet and have you carried away with the rip tide. It all started for Caroline Price and Audrey Sutter, two friends who ended up in a near-fatal car accident near the river in a small town in Minnesota. Two state troopers had found Audrey half-frozen and alive, while her friend Caroline drowned from the icy water. When word had came about, it reminded Gordon Burke of a similar crime that happened a decade ago to his own daughter. While the police had never found the culprits for that crime, it was up to Audrey to remember what happened to her and the attack on her and friend. As she recovered from her injuries, she talked to Gordon Burke and to the sheriffs on the past case. After her father passed away, she wanted to carry on with his wishes to solve the mystery and to pick up the pieces to that unsolved crime that had the same end result. Though both cases were similar in nature, she had uncovered a sniff of police corruption and a scandal that headed straight to Iowa. With a bit of coercion to arrest the right culprit, she had to fend for herself and make justice be served for Holly and Caroline.