Shouting Distance

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

Officer Murray Abraham Tayloe the Third of the Chattanooga PD is out on patrol in the rainy mountains of Appalachian Tennessee when he and his partner get a call that changes everything he knows to be true. There’s a woman alone on the highway, soaked to the bone, and she is forgetting herself… and remembering someone else. 

Tess Maltwood mostly sees herself in the mirror, but sometimes it’s someone else. Someone who smokes, drinks, and knows things that happened before she was born. Tayloe believes there’s something otherworldly going on, and the further he digs, the more dirt he finds. Soon it becomes clear that Tess’s crumbling mind holds the key to a missing person’s case from 1959, but old grudges die hard in the Dirty South. Somebody, somewhere may have to kill this one twice.

Shouting Distance is supernatural southern noir, near kin to True Detective with a hint of Justified and a dash of the X-Files. A police drama with a twist, this story is set at the southern end of the Appalachian foothills—where the 21st century is sometimes slow to intrude. It’s ideal for fans of paranormal mystery, horror, and crime fiction alike.

“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

• 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