SURVIVED BY
In Cadwell County, Idaho, one man decides how you died — and then he buries you. Preston Lowry has been the elected county coroner for twenty-six years. The...
About this ebook
SURVIVED BY by Julian Ashvale is available in the Ebokio digital catalog as an EPUB ebook.
Price: £8.99. Language: English. Categories: Mystery & Suspense.
In Cadwell County, Idaho, one man decides how you died — and then he buries you. Preston Lowry has been the elected county coroner for twenty-six years.
The law here requires no medical training for the job, only votes, and Press has run unopposed since 1999 because he is also the funeral director, and because a town of eleven hundred people would rather not think about it.
He writes one of five words on a state form and that is what happened to you, forever. Hollis Carder is thirteen, and she writes the other half.
Her grandmother owns the Crosscut Clarion — four pages, monthly, three hundred and forty copies — and her grandmother has not written a coherent sentence in eighteen months, and the paper is the only money in the house. So Hollis writes it.
All of it, including the obituaries, at five-forty in the morning, before school. She has decided how four hundred and six dead people will be remembered, and not one of their families knows it.
Then a man comes home to Crosscut after twenty-seven years for a killing the whole county has agreed about, nineteen days pass, and Hollis's mother is found dead in the newspaper's archive room with the wrong man standing in the doorway. Hollis knows he did not do it.
She knows because she was there four minutes before he was, and because she knows exactly what she saw, and because the truth will take the last person she has left.
She has four minutes and three years of knowing precisely how a death gets written down in this county — and she uses them.
But an old man three doors up the street has stood in a room like that one before, and dressed it, and got away with it for twenty-seven years, and he can read his own handwriting in a thirteen-year-old's work.
SURVIVED BY is a crime novel about the one thing a small town cannot survive without and cannot bear to have: an accurate account.
It is about a girl who holds the pen, a man who has held it too long, and the terrible arithmetic of a merciful lie — which is never free, and is always paid for by whoever has the fewest people to defend them.
For readers of small-town American crime, of literary mysteries that break your heart on the way to the answer, and of stories where the last chapter costs everybody something.
Slow-burning, exactly plotted, and closed at the end: every question in this book is answered, and every answer has a price on it. If you finish it and find yourself sitting in the car for a minute before you go in, tell somebody.
A review is how a book like this one finds the next reader.
Book details
Details: 290 pages, about 81,178 words, published by Julian Ashvale, publication date 5 September 2026.
Estimated reading time: about 5.5 hours.
Format, language, and reading
SURVIVED BY is delivered as an EPUB ebook in English, and reads on phone, tablet, or computer through the Ebokio web reader with no app to install and no DRM.
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