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Where the Warm Room Is
On the frozen steps of a locked church in a northern town nobody remembers, sixteen-year-old Charlie Mercer meets a man who offers him what everyone else has taken back: a warm room, a name that isn't his, a place at a fire. Cyrus Walcott runs a kingdom in the shell of an abandoned glassworks, a circle of the town's lost held together by drink and drugs and the low patient voice of a man who has been the same kind of hunter for twenty years.
Charlie's mother left when he was eight. His father drinks. Somewhere on the edge of the works, a thin woman he does not know watches from the fence. And a dog Cyrus has starved into a weapon has begun to keep secrets of its own.
When Charlie's father dies at the loading dock with the boy's own knife in the scene, the story writes itself: a runaway son, a drunk father, a rage that got out of hand. Detective Sergeant Cole is not so sure. And a witness who saw the whole of that night has walked out of eight years of dark for reasons Charlie will not understand until he crosses a black river on foot to stand between her and the man who owns the works.
Lost Saints is a novel of the seam between the two halves of a town, and the ones the town never once thought to look for.
On the frozen steps of a locked church in a northern town nobody remembers, sixteen-year-old Charlie Mercer meets a man who offers him what everyone else has taken back: a warm room, a name that isn't his, a place at a fire. Cyrus Walcott runs a kingdom in the shell of an abandoned glassworks, a circle of the town's lost held together by drink and drugs and the low patient voice of a man who has been the same kind of hunter for twenty years.
Charlie's mother left when he was eight. His father drinks. Somewhere on the edge of the works, a thin woman he does not know watches from the fence. And a dog Cyrus has starved into a weapon has begun to keep secrets of its own.
When Charlie's father dies at the loading dock with the boy's own knife in the scene, the story writes itself: a runaway son, a drunk father, a rage that got out of hand. Detective Sergeant Cole is not so sure. And a witness who saw the whole of that night has walked out of eight years of dark for reasons Charlie will not understand until he crosses a black river on foot to stand between her and the man who owns the works.
Lost Saints is a novel of the seam between the two halves of a town, and the ones the town never once thought to look for.