MISPLACED

by Howard Pease

MISPLACED is as much a detective story as a ghost story. It is set in an anonymous post-industrial northern town and describes from a personal perspective how a seemingly unremarkable encounter by two individuals near an isolated embankment would set in motion a series of slowly unfolding revelations which would lay bare the consuming agony of a woman’s life, the nightmare that outlived her, and finally the motive behind her appearance. Discovering this however would have its price, destabilising the already fragile mental health of someone who discovers too late that he has strayed into manipulative waters way beyond his depth. In the end his determination to understand the purpose behind what he had seen would become all-consuming, stripping him of his health and threatening what was left of his sanity. All that remained would be his resolve and that would prove to be enough – just.

61 pages, Kindle Edition

First published July 21, 2013

About the author

Howard Pease was an American writer of adventure stories from Stockton, California. Most of his stories revolved around a young protagonist, Joseph Todhunter ("Tod") Moran, who shipped out on tramp freighters during the interwar years.
Pease received two literary awards during his lifetime. In 1944, he received the California Commonwealth Book Award for his novel Thunderbolt House (reprinted by Scholastic as Mystery at Thunderbolt House, published that year, and in 1946 he was awarded the Children's Book Award from the Children's Book Committee at Bank Street College of Education "for a book that deals realistically with problems in the child's world" for his novel Heart of Danger.