The Red Thread: A Novel in Three Incarnations

How do you avenge -- or forgive -- your own murder four hundred years after it happened?

Prompted by recurrent dreams, sixteen-year-old Dana Landgrave uncovers an ancient crime that has drawn the same souls together through three lifetimes.

There's nothing sinister about the girl's sunlit twenty-first-century American life in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Yet, centuries ago, terrible things were done -- by someone she knows! Could it be her easygoing, easy-to-look-at boyfriend, Chase? Or her younger brother, Ben, who has been confined to a wheelchair since a school bus accident? What about Gianna, her inscrutable enemy on the yearbook staff? Or her eccentric psychotherapist, Dr. Sprague?

As Dana summons courage to reenter the past, each incarnation propels her to new discoveries -- and new suspicions -- until the threads of all three lives converge in a devastating revelation.

Roderick Townley's first book about Sylvie, The Great Good Thing, was a Top-Ten Book Sense Pick, praised by Kirkus Reviews as "utterly winning...a book beloved from the first page." Its sequel, Into the Labyrinth, was hailed by the New York Times as "a hopping fine read." The present volume completes the Sylvie cycle.

Mr. Townley has also published the novel Sky, described by VOYA as "one hell of a book," as well as volumes of poetry, nonfiction, and literary criticism. He has two children, Jesse and Grace, and is married to author Wyatt Townley.