The Soul Searcher

Three souls. Three centuries. One forgery of heaven.

Montana, 2012. Emily Ellen drowned in the Clark Fork the summer she was sixteen, four feet from her little brother, and she has not left her bedroom since. Then a living girl moves into that room and cries in exactly the way Emily used to cry, and asks whether they are the same person. It is the kindest thing that has happened to Emily since she died. It is also the most dangerous.

Vietnam, 1965. Corporal Shelby Raymond enlisted to become the son his father actually wanted. Sixteen men followed him up a staircase in a building with no roof, and he has spent forty-seven years on that floor with their bones.

Salem, 1692. Dawn Adams was four weeks short of her sixteenth birthday when she went into a frightened child's room to ease the pain of a burned hand. Her mother sat on the High Council of Witches. Her father was the judge sending girls to the fire.

Each of them is found. Each is offered a gate, a light, a field with a river running through it - everything they have wanted for decades or for centuries.

Each of them walks in.

A dark supernatural novel of guilt, deception, and the roads people take without meaning to.

Jerry Leake is the author of ten books of fiction and nine books on rhythm and percussion. His fiction ranges across thrillers, dark fantasy, and literary suspense - the Jack's Alive trilogy, the Twin Crossing duology, Lethal Injection, The Soul Searcher, Sand and Ceremony - and often draws on the places and people he knows firsthand. He has also written cartoon and comic collections - Far Fetched, Dogbreath - and books for younger readers. He is a Professor of World Percussion at Berklee College of Music and a faculty member at the New England Conservatory, where he has taught for more than thirty years. His percussion texts on North Indian, South Indian, West African, and Afro-Cuban rhythm are used by students and players worldwide. He has studied and performed in Ghana and India, and is a founding member of Natraj and Club d'Elf, leads the world-rock fusion octet Cubist, and has long played with the Agbekor Drum and Dance Society.