The Current: A Novel

Tim Johnston

Jan 2019 · Highbridge Audio · Narrated by Sarah Mollo-Christensen

About this audiobook

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.

About the author

Tim Johnston was born in Iowa City. He attended and graduated from the University of Iowa and the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He was the 2011 Jeny McKean Moore Writer -in Residence at the George Washington University. His stories have appeared in California Quarterly, Double Take, Best Life Magazine, The Iowa Review and Narrative Magazine. Irish Girl won an O. Henry Prize, the New Letters Award for Writers. The collection won the 2009 Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction. His other works include Two Years and Never So Green. In 2015 his title, Descent made The New York Times Best Seller List. A stage and voice actor, Sarah Mollo-Christensen received her BA from Dartmouth College and graduated from the Atlantic Theater Company's Acting Conservatory in New York City. As an actress, she has appeared on prestigious regional stages, including the Folger Shakespeare Theatre in Washington D.C.