Shouting Distance

A dead man’s memories, a decades-old murder, and a race against time.

It's the middle of the night in rural Tennessee, and it's raining like a son-of-a-bitch—but a woman is out there anyway, sitting alone on a guardrail beside the highway. Officer Murray Tayloe and his partner have responded to a 911 call about it, so now they're out there, too. And things are getting strange. At first, Tess Maltwood is in her right mind as far as Murray can tell... and then she's not.

Doctors call it "early onset" when dementia hits someone her age, but a diagnosis can't explain everything. Sometimes Tess's dwindling memories are replaced by those of a smoking, drinking family man who thinks it's 1959. His name is Wilson Hayes, and he's pretty sure he's Murray's partner on the force. 

Something otherworldly is going on, but Tess’s mind is crumbling—so if Hayes is ever getting justice, he'll have to get it fast. But not everybody wants the truth to come to light, and old grudges die hard in the Dirty South. Somebody may have to kill this one twice.

“With Shouting Distance, Cherie Priest once again proves that she is not only one of the finest horror writers alive, but also one of the greatest living writers of southern literature with all of the terrible weight of its legacy. She unflinchingly looks at the ugliness, cruelty, and doomed nobility of those caught in the crucible of the American South both in the past, the present, and beyond.” — John Hornor Jacobs, author of A Lush and Seething Hell and The Night That Finds Us All