Nicholas Close is riding his motorcycle on the wet streets when he thinks he sees something just off the road in the trees.  He has a little crash, but he is okay.  He calls home to tell his wife, Cate, that everything is all right and that he may be a little late getting back home.  She climbs from the ladder to answer the phone, becomes unbalanced, falls, breaks her neck on the side of the tub, and dies.

This is the beginning of a very bad run of luck for Nicholas.  After his wife’s death, for which he blames himself, he has a fall and hits his head rather hard.  That knock on the noggin jars something in his brain, and whatever it was that was rattled loose now allows him to see the dead.  He sees them in an endless loop of how they died.  Seeing his late wife fall and die over and over is more than he can handle.

To get a grip on himself, Nicholas moves back to his childhood hometown to stay with his mother.  His mother, Katharine, doesn’t seem too keen on him being there; Nicholas reminds her too much of his father, an odd bird himself.  And having Nicholas back brings back a lot of the past, things Katharine would be pleased if they’d stay buried.

Along with those memories of troubled times comes new troubles.  No sooner is Nicholas back home than a child goes missing and turns up dead, with his throat slit.  Just like Nicholas’s boyhood friend, Tristam.  When Tristam was kidnapped, it very easily could have been Nicholas–they were chased through the woods by the murder.  No sooner is new murder put away than Tristam’s brother, Gavin, shows up on Nicholas’s doorstep and proceeds to eat not one, but two bullets, right there in front of Nicholas.  From then on, of course, Nicholas can see Gavin’s ghost coming down the street and committing suicide over and over.

Just as haunting as Gavin’s ghost, is Gavin’s last words to Nicholas:  “It should have been you.  You touched the bird.”  On the day that Tristam was abducted, he and Nicholas found a mutilated bird on the trail to the woods.  No one knew about that.

No one knows a lot of things in the town, like what exactly is living in the woods, why are pagan symbols in the Anglican church, and what has been killing children for over a hundred years.  It’s a mystery that draws Nicholas and his family into a tangled web, literally.

The Dead Pathis 50/50.  It’s 50% interesting and 50% not.  When it moves it moves, and when it doesn’t it doesn’t.  Stephen M. Irwin’s style is rather dry and dull.  Nothing ever really grabs you and pulls you along kicking and screaming.  For a book that isn’t very long, reading it felt as though it were twice its length.  It would drag, then pick up, then drag, then become interesting, then drag some more–that’s the kind of rollercoaster it was.  Even forty pages from the end, I was considering not finishing it.

As far as seeing dead people, I would have thought Nicholas would have seen more than he does.  For them to be around us all the time, it was kind of spare on the spectre side.  It felt more like a tool, or a gimmick, than an actual integral part of the plot.

The half that is good, you have to wade through the mush to get to it.  I’m not sure if it’s really worth it or not.  The Dead Path goes from believable to utter nonsense, and based on that back and forth I wouldn’t recommend this book.  The good parts go nowhere, the bad parts put you to sleep.

2.5 out of 5
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