Excerpt from Grist Mill Road by Christopher J. Yates, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

But, of course, this is easy to say looking back twenty-six years. At the time, Matthew just felt like an older brother to me—even more so than my actual older brother. I feared him and loved him in equal measure.

I suppose we'd never really discussed girls in any sort of making-out sense but I think Matthew had had sex already, probably more than once. If I'd asked, I'm sure he would've told me. But I didn't ask, the whole thing made me feel incredibly uncomfortable. For several months I'd seen him looking at girls in a way that would slowly become familiar to me—if I'm being honest with myself, I probably resented that.

So it didn't surprise me much when, not long after we'd trekked to our secret spot with Hannah, Matthew sent me away on my own. It's a new game, he said, called Reconnaissance. And then Matthew tried to sell it to me like I was a spy and now I'd get to sneak around and if I spotted anything, like deer or a hiker, I should report it when I returned.

Oh and Tricky, he added, just as I was leaving. Take your time, OK.

So I skulked around for thirty or forty minutes, making it as far as the trailhead for Sunset Ridge, not seeing any hikers or deer. But I did almost step on a huge black rat snake, a dark flurry whipping over the fiercely lit rock, at which point, figuring I'd been gone long enough, I started to head back, feeling proud to be returning with something cool to report. Maybe Matthew would suggest a game of Snake Hunt and we'd go back to the spot with our entire arsenal of weapons. Also I was thinking about the look of shock on Hannah's face when, with my arms spread wide, I would hiss the word snake, six feet long and as thick as my arm.

Perhaps at the time it should have occurred to me that, the same as with cats, when a black snake crosses your path it's an omen. And what if I'd taken such a hint? What if I hadn't returned through the mountain laurel back to our secret spot? Then I'm certain that, twenty-six years on, my story would now be heading toward a different end. Not that I believe my being there, my being a witness, made any difference to what Matthew did that day. But certainly it changed me, changed me in such a way that the conclusion to my story now seems like an inevitability. So much so that the right ending has come to feel like my purpose.

Pushing my way through the last of the branches, I broke onto the scene and there they were, already in position. I remember being amazed at how much rope Matthew had used. It reminded me of old silent movies, the victim mouthing screams as she lies on the railroad tracks, already cocooned by the caped villain.

Matthew fired his first shot. Hannah cried out in pain. Everything was rolling now.

Excerpted from Grist Mill Road by Christopher J Yates. Copyright © 2018 by Christopher J Yates. Excerpted by permission of Picador. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.