The Current by Tim Johnston
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
The Current is about a “closed” investigation and a current one. They both involve at least 1 woman dying in a river under suspicious circumstances. There are cops, lovers, and family dynamics interspersed amongst the slow march towards a resolution. It starts off with a college road trip back to Minnesota with Caroline and Audrey, who I would say is the main character. This trip felt relatable as I have made many college road trips before. A strong supporting character is Gordon, a father, who is just getting by day by day. A majority of the story takes place in Minnesota, which is where I am from, or Iowa. It was cool to have that relation to a major location and I could connect when the sights and smells of the state were described. There are several tangents that are explored but the investigation takes a backseat to the description of the characters’ lives.
I would not say that this is a heart-pounding thriller or even a regular thriller. It is not a murder mystery or cop procedural. I am not sure how I would classify this book. Tim Johnston is the author and one thing I think he is good at is painting a vivid and unique picture of what is going on. On the road trip, he describes moving “out of cotton country into wheat and then into corn”, which one can trace on a map in their mind. Or describing someone as smelling of “the outdoors, but an outdoors that was much later in the day and colder”. He had some beautiful language and could be quite eloquent but there were many things that annoyed me about this book. One set of grievances was the way it was written. There were plenty of run-on sentences and missing punctuation, mostly when relaying conversations. It could be a technique that he utilized but it didn’t work for me. There was a high percentage of chapters that took me several paragraphs to understand what was happening, who was being talked about, or even when it was taking place. The author used generic pronouns and set no signposts to help guide the reader. He seemed to be obfuscating on purpose. There are many words that I would use to describe his writing style including murky, convoluted, and elusive, to name a few. Another grievance was the lack of urgency or excitement at any point. I wouldn’t go as far as to say it was boring, but I was thinking, just get on with it a lot of the time. In general, it was a lot of work to read this book. You had to read every single sentence closely and this just wasn’t something I was expecting or looking for at this time. I was disappointed. To use another analogy, it was like wading through molasses. The first spike of intrigue was over halfway through and then 4o pages from the end I felt a smidgen of tension but even then, it was like wading through warmed up molasses. It also is not wrapped up in a clearly defined bow. Read Reykjavik: A Crime Story or even reread Stieg Larsson instead.
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