-
Access Our
Most Anticipated
Books of 2025!
Summary | Excerpt | Reviews | Beyond the book | Read-Alikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio
Book Reviewed by:The stunning vistas of the Rocky Mountains reveal a dark and deadly side in this brilliantly conceived thriller about family ties and the fight for survival.
Descent, the story of a family undone by the disappearance of a daughter who went out for a morning run and didn't come back, is stunning in its emotional impact - a compulsively readable page-turner with a strong literary sensibility.
The girl's vanishing - on a sunny, late-summer vacation morning- - all the more devastating for its mystery, is the beginning of the family's harrowing journey down increasingly divergent and solitary paths, until all that continues to bind them to each other are the questions they can never bring themselves to ask: At what point does a family stop searching? At what point does a girl stop fighting for her life?
Johnston captures every emotion, every terrifying thought, every moment of loneliness, from the perspectives of everyone in the family - as each in his or her own way assumes responsibility for their collective loss. And in the father we see the last flicker of hope as he pursues every angle and refuses to give up in his belief that his daughter is still alive. Ultimately he finds an answer, in a climax that is stunning in both its execution and its resolution.
This combination of a great story and beautiful writing brings to mind the works of Tim Gautreaux, Dennis Lehane, and Russell Banks.
Every once in a rare while a book is written that fulfills every requirement a reader is looking for. Tim Johnston has mastered that in Descent...continued
Full Review
(879 words)
This review is available to non-members for a limited time. For full access,
become a member today.
(Reviewed by First Impressions Reviewers).
In 2007, Tim Johnston's father asked him if he would go to his new house in the Rockies and do the finish work. Johnston made his living as a carpenter at the time, and since 2006 his father had been asking him to do the job. Johnston wasn't writing at the time; he was contemplating, instead, that he might never write again, and so he finally agreed to his father's request. It was in the midst of painting the many rooms of the vast house, wall by wall, that a family popped into his consciousness. As Johnston said – and as many writers have also stated – "If you get a great idea for a story, try like hell to forget it, and if you can't, then go ahead and start writing."
He couldn't. The family, who would later become the ...
This "beyond the book" feature is available to non-members for a limited time. Join today for full access.
If you liked Descent, try these:
by Stephanie Kuehn
Published 2016
Trust nothing and no one as you race toward the explosive conclusion of the gripping psychological thriller Complicit from Stephanie Kuehn, the William C. Morris Award--winning author of Charm & Strange.
by Peter Heller
Published 2015
Peter Heller, the celebrated author of the breakout best seller The Dog Stars, returns with an achingly beautiful, wildly suspenseful second novel about an artist trying to outrun his past.
Alice LaPlante, author of A Circle of Wives
Tim Johnston knows secrets about families - about mothers and daughters, fathers and sons - and knows how to render them on the page with heartbreaking beauty and lyricism.
