Five Parts Dead

by Tim Pegler

What do you do when you’ve just lost three of your best mates?
Who do you turn to when your life is suddenly bound to a wheelchair?

Dan has dodged the Reaper again. If he were a cat, five of his nine lives would be gone—when his mates didn’t even get second chances. He’s still grieving their deaths when he’s dragged on a family holiday at a remote island lighthouse.

Left alone, at what feels like the end of the earth, Dan starts sensing a mysterious girl. Is she a dream? Or has he somehow hooked into the spirit world?

The lighthouse logbook helps illuminate some of the girl’s tragic story but Dan will have to dig deeper to find answers and the inspiration to embrace life again.

Tim Pegler gets inside the minds and hearts of teenagers and captures their voices—spot on.

Genres: Young Adult, Realistic Fiction, Paranormal, Romance, Ghosts, Fantasy, Mystery

224 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 2010

About the author

Tim Pegler is a Melbourne-based journalist and YA fiction author. His novels to date are strongly influenced by his time covering crime and social inequity issues as a journalist.

Tim's first novel, Game as Ned, was a Children's Book Council of Australia notable book in 2008. Five Parts Dead was released to critical acclaim in 2010.

Reviews

[Nomes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tim Pegler is some sort of plotting genius. He has two timelines, Dan's present day holiday at the island (which also includes flashbacks to his life before the accident) and the second story of the people who lived at the light house which is unveiled through the light house log and some research at a local museum.

The pacing is so well done that everything unfolds brilliantly, always leaving more mystery and secrets for the reader - the whole mass of story and emotions and mystery is all explored in just under 200 pages and it's incredible how much power and emotion is packed into such a short space. One of the dangers of weaving different time lines and characters together is that I often end up being more invested in one of the stories than the other. Not so here - in fact, I felt deeply immersed in all the characters and their journeys.

It's eerie. Okay, so I was reading it home alone in the middle of the night during a coastal storm. And, initially, I felt freaked out in a goosebumpy delicious way which then changed to a complete wide-eyed horror as the story progressed. There's some gore and creepy stuff going down.

It has a very sexy, very teen love story in there.

Not only is the story stunning - both timelines, but the characters, make this book far more than just a captivating story. They're the kind of characters that feel real, that are captured in smart, succinct dialogue and individual nuances. They're characters that make you ache and laugh and it was so easy for me to visualise them and find myself caring for them immensely.
Me and Five Parts Dead

I don't cry in books. Sometimes I call books tear jerkers because they really tug at my emotions. I was happily grinning away one page and completely invested in the story, madly flipping through pages, and then - BAM - the next minute my eyes have welled up and tears are spilling over and I felt like I had been ripped open.

Other cool cool stuff:

Pip (funky 17 year old girl)- reads Markus Zusak's The Book Thief, out in the sun on the island. Loved that :)

Dan's a twin. I love twin stuff in books. And this is cool as his twin is a sister.

the car crash scene is the best I have ever read, anywhere. Talk about graphic - I was wide-eyed and hit hard. Mesmerising prose. I don't think the images created in my mind will ever leave me.

there's some freaky haunting stuff in here. Including an exorcism scene - which is creepier as it's notated factually in the light house log book.

there's some cannibalistic stuff going down. Everyone loves a bit of cannibalism, yeah :)

I got right inside Dan's head space - such an honest and funny and heart-felt male POV. I really love the guy. And he's having such a rough time...

Recommended: Five Parts Dead is on my favourites shelf (obviously) and I can't wait until my boys (and my girl) are old enough to read it. It's a perfect novel for all ages, that will capture the imagination of all readers - but it's especially brilliant for boys and reluctant readers. This is a book that will not only mesmerise readers, but one that will linger. And did I mention it's funny? I so love books that make me grin :)

[Sue Bursztynski · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this because the author is one of three coming to my school next week and I have to say I'm now looking forward to the visit. It's a mix of ghost story, murder mystery (150 years old murder mystery, that is), teen angst and plain old-fashioned holiday mystery of the kind where the kid goes on a holiday he doesn't want to go on and has an adventure that makes him glad he went. Throughout the book, the reader is gradually introduced to Dan's own mystery - what really happened the night of that party when his three friends were killed. The ending, without spoilers, is a positive one, with the mystery solving and the company with whom he solves it helping him handle his own problems and put them in perspective.

[Isamlq · Rating 2 out of 5]

Haunting… that’s what ties the two stories together. Where on the one hand, there’s Dan struggling with just going on, eaten up both by what’s said but more so by what’s left unsaid. Then on the other, a story of people making do and later doing a most incomprehensible thing... and that would be Lily’s story.

Interesting story, if you look at all the individual elements. There’s Dan and Pip, and how he sees what’s there and what could be. It’s a sweet addition to what’s over all a mish mash of so many things. There’s Dan and Mel and their twin-ness. I felt this more than slightly hokey, though. So, when bringing twins into the mix, is it at all possible to talk of a sibling closeness without looping back to this super twin mind link? Because as a twin myself, I’ve not experienced it , at least none that I recall *thinks back* Nope, not once have I had my brother knocking about in my head to pass some secret message for me and me alone. That said, the former closeness between the two is evident BUT it’s a relationship that’s made even more complex with one admittedly feeling overshadowed by the other… now that, that there was an aspect that rang real.

And like I said, it’s a mish mash of a lot of things. There’s impromptu crime solving going on, there’s that new unexpected and slightly insecure young love shimmering about, but mostly, it’s him trying to see beyond being ‘five parts dead,’ beyond him asking why him and not them. It weaves in the sad with the mysterious slash scary moments of maybe ghostly apparitions as well as someone who got him for good measure and this was an OK story.

2.5/5

[girlpower12121 · Rating 5 out of 5]

The detail will leave you breathless, this story will make you think twice and the horror of it all will make you turn, page after page, waiting to find out the truth.

This is one story i will truely cherrish. I loved it. Not only did it hold a mystery to it but the horrific detail is...gut wrenching. I cried at one point in the book which im sure will pull the strings on the hearts of the people who read it.

This book, i would deffinatly recomend it. I loved it through an through. Im sure everyone that reads this will love it and feel some connection to it. My life has changed from reading it.

Great job Tim Keep it up!

For me its 5/5 =D

MJ_Lover xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo

[Mari · Rating 1 out of 5]

idk 1.5 i guess.

at last the day has come for me to use the words "stilted dialogue" in a review. seriously:

'Hey Dan. Did I wake you?'
'Nah. Didn't sleep much. How about you?'
'Not too bad. Once Mel shut up.'
'Yeah, she goes on a bit. Umm, you going back to bed?'
'I was going to read for a bit. Why?'
'I, err, you didn't see any...anything odd last night did you?'

(btw, if you're picking this book up, you better get used to those "umm"s, "err"s, and ellipsis(es?), cause they ain't leaving.)

i liked the (few) funny bits ("I wave to them. With one finger." come on, that's funny, i don't just have a twelve year old's sense of humour, do i) and the car accident bits seemed realistic rather than just melodramatic, which, as horrifying as it was to read about, was a good thing imo.

unfortunately (because i actually wanted to love this book), that's about all the good i can say. pretty much everything else (actually, the car accident, too, depending on what angle you're looking at it from) about this story and its moral was heavy-handed and the writing was more suitable for a silly middle-grade book.

these days i seldom return ebooks to amazon, even ones i dislike. but i'm not rich enough to pay $15 for a shitty one with shitty editing, so this one's gonna have to go.

[M.S. · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't really want to write too much about Five Parts Dead, since it was a book I read for school and I'm about to spend an entire term studying it. What I will say is that it was much better than everyone made it out to be. I actually enjoyed this book. There were brief glimpses of an incredible book, and they were what kept me reading for long periods of time, rather than the chapter-a-day scheme I had in mind (or the Don't-Read-It-At-All scheme I had originally planned). The subject of death particularly interested me, and I felt that serious issues were tackled very professionally in this book. Tim Pegler quite clearly has a way with words. I felt he was a very good writer and did a fantastic job of capturing one of the most common human emotions; confusion. As long as you can suspend disbelief, the main plotline is perfectly fine. However, if you're very picky on things being realistic and earthly, I wouldn't suggest this book. It goess deep into spirits and psychic ability and ghosts, which I found very interesting and enjoyable. Five Parts Dead is not a book I would have ever ended up reading in my spare time, so I guess I'm glad that school plopped it in my lap. Overall, I quite enjoyed Five Parts Dead and I hope for big things in future for Tim Pegler

[Lynda · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a great novel for mid-upper secondary students, with lots of gritty reality but a paranormal streak too, written convincingly well.
Dan has survived a reckless car crash, in which his best mates are killed/seriously injured. He is now the subject of shame and blame - but only he knows the truth of what really went down.
When the family, including his confident, popular twin sister Mel and her bestie Pip, go for a holiday to a remote lighthouse, Dan is confronted by more than his own personal trauma – but eventually discovers that he does have the power to hope and heal.
Although this is its own, unique, stand-alone novel, it resonates with JC Burke's 'The Story of Tom Brennan'.

[Annette Heslin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dan was involved in a car accident, a moment of stupidity in young lives. Three of his mates died, one is a quadriplegic, and Dan was mostly unscathed - a broken leg.

Hid family take him on a holiday as they think that will benefit him. They have booked the Lighthouse Keeper's Cottage on Tammar Island.

It's here that Dan feels a presence of a mystery girl and it leads him to unravelling her story and a 150-year-old mystery.

Absolutely enjoyed this book - two stories that have tragic consequences, but a chance one can have a happy ending.

[Landon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Five parts I really liked this book it pulls in from the beginning to end.

[Ron · Rating 2 out of 5]

I recently read a reference anthology of ghost stories from the past two centuries, an experience which helped me to see how difficult it is to write a ghost story that is actually scary. Or find one to read, for that matter. The general template for a ghost story is: uncover rumours of dastardly deeds; have narrator show disbelief that the ghost could possibly be a ghost; compose spine tingling scenes where the ghost makes a personal and inevitably corny appearance (or sequence of increasingly corny appearances) confirming beyond all doubt that it is a ghost before said ghost is (a) exorcised (b) laid to rest (c) fled from in haste.

Pegler has kept to this template, but has also used a framing story device that makes the piece a little more engaging. Only a little more, though, since the rumours of dastardly deeds in the lighthousekeeping community of the 1850s remains by far the more interesting of the two tales that are sort of interwoven here.

And if there is a shortcoming to this novel, it is in that "sort of" qualification.

Dan's motivation to lay the ghost to rest seems to arise from the way that he himself is misunderstood and judged by his community. The B plot here is that he was involved in a fatal car crash that had a higher body count than Romeo & Juliet, and everyone holds him responsible for it, whereas he might only have been mostly responsible, or maybe not responsible at all (you'll have to read the novel to find out!). It's an awkward fit, though, since the girl who became the ghost was condemned for a whole raft of things that she was almost certainly not responsible for. Plus, Dan doesn't know about the condemnation she suffered at the beginning of the ghostly goings on, so his initial empathy for her is somewhat mysterious. The overlay doesn't get much clearer if you take the fact that there are hauntings in each story as the connective tissue, either. The overall result (unless you employ the Completion Backwards Principle) is that you have two tales that sit side-by-side rather than complementing each other, as should happen in a framed story.

Just possibly the theme of justice is the thing that was meant to tie it all up into a nice little parable, but that doesn't help with the near miss nature of the teaming. Okay, as one story is laid to rest, so is the other (more or less), but that's just narrative arc, surely...

Oh, and parable it is, by the way. Don't drink and drive, teenagers, and don't ride with someone drink-driving, or allow someone who has been drinking to drive. Or you'll regret it. And your best mates will die. And a baby will die, too. Maybe also some kittehs.

Got it?

Perhaps that message is why this text is so often found on high school reading lists. It couldn't be the authentic voice of the narrator, since it's not all that authentic, except maybe for the gritty way he swears quite often, in between using killer verbs to show, not tell, the story he's unfolding (the river is "snickering", Pip's skin "ripples" with goosebumps, etc). The scary elements are like off-day Scooby Doo, so don't try to engage the kids with that aspect of it, because they'll just start reeling off movie titles (film is scarier to the young adult than prose will ever be). Also, there are cultural things that just don't sit right (hint: most kids in high school nowadays haven't actually seen Star Wars, and won't resonate with the references to the Millennium Falcon et al any better than they would with references to Mozart).

Finally, danger flags for suicide, and for twins. Twins can read each other's mind, did you know that?

[Zawhtut · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dan ဆိုတဲ့ေကာင္ေလးတစ္ေယာက္ရဲ ့အေၾကာင္းကိုေရးထားတာပါ။ သူ ့မွာအမႊာညီအမ ျဖစ္တဲ့ Mel ဆိုတာရွိတယ္။ အမႊာသာဆိုရတယ္ သူ ့ညီမကအျမဲကံေကာင္းတတ္ျပီး အဆိုးမွန္သမ်ွသူ ့ဘက္မွာခ်ည္းပဲ။
ီDan ဟာသူ ့ရဲ ့ဘ၀ကိုသူ ့ညီမနဲ ့ယွဥ္ျပီးအဆိုးျမင္ေနတတ္သူပါ။ Dan ဟာကံဆိုးမိုးေမွာင္စြာနဲ ့ပဲ ယာဥ္တိုက္မွု
တစ္ခုၾကံဳေတြ ့ခဲ့ရပါတယ္။ Dan ရဲ ့ေျခေထာက္က်ိဳးသြားျပီး သူ ့ရဲ ့အဆိုးျမင္တဲ့စိတ္ကပိုပိုဆိုးလာခဲ့ပါတယ္။
ဒီလိုနဲ ့Dan တို ့ရဲ ့မိသားစုဟာကြ်န္းေလးတစ္ကြ်န္းကိုေပ်ာ္ပြဲစားထြက္ၾကပါတယ္။ အဲဒီကြ်န္းကသူတို ့ေနတဲ့ ဘန္ဂလို အိမ္မွာ သရဲမတစ္ေယာက္ရွိတာကို Dan သိလာပါတယ္။ ဒီလိုနဲ ့ဟိုဟိုဒီဒီသြားၾကည့္ရာက ေမွ်ာ္စင္
တစ္ခုကို Dan ၀င္ၾကည့္ျဖစ္တယ္။ အဲဒီေမွ်ာ္စင္ရဲ ့မွတ္တမ္းစာအုပ္နဲ ့သရဲနဲ ့စပ္စက္ေနပံုကို Dan သိရွိသြားေတာ့ သူ ့ညီမ Mel ရဲ ့သူငယ္ခ်င္း Pip ကိုသူသိသမွ်ေဖာက္သည္ခ်ပါေတာ့တယ္။ Pip ခမွ်ာလည္း
ဖခင္ျဖစ္သူ ဆံုးပါးသြားလို ့ေသျခင္းတရားကိုနားလည္ေနတဲ့ေကာင္မေလးတစ္ေယာက္ပါ။ Pip ကေနာက္ေတာ့ Dan နဲ ့ခ်စ္ၾကိဳက္သြားၾကတယ္။ ေမွ်ာ္စင္ရဲ ့မွတ္တမ္းစာအုပ္ ကုတင္ေျခရင္းမွာလာငိုေနခဲ့တဲ့ အမည္မသိသရဲ
Dan ရဲ ့Pip ကိုခ်စ္ေရးဆိုဖို ့ၾကိဳးပမ္းမွု စသည္ျဖင့္ တင္ျပပံုေကာင္းလွတဲ့ Tim Pegler ရဲ ့ Five Parts Dead ကိုႏွစ္ျခိဳက္လိမ့္မယ္လို ့ထင္ပါတယ္။

[Domenica · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book should've been good. But it was unfortunately very dull, at least in my opinion. The novel is supposed to be about how a boy who has come very close to death a few times, connects with the spirit world, particularly a girl featured in a lighthouse log book from a long time ago. But the spirit world isn't often seen. It's mostly just the main character reading the log book (the content of which is actually interesting, but was largely inspired from an existing log book. the most interesting part was not even the authors own work). Other than the log book, the main character also had an awkward teen romance with his twin sister's best friend; which was at least somewhat relatable to the target audience. All in all, the story had great potential, but disappointed.

[Chantal · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great Australian teen fiction. Set in South Australia, deals with issues of peer pressure, drink driving and the consequences; and even throws in a touch of historical fiction, murder and the paranormal...and then of course, these are all tied together by friend and family relationships!
Quirky, interesting, even a bit gruesome and a great option for reluctant teen readers.

[Trisha]

tight & authentic

[Mari · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

[Nhan · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book had a weak plot and ending.

[Jack A · Rating 4 out of 5]

very compelling book

[Gezdawg · Rating 4 out of 5]

it was quite a enjoyable book and it had a good story line

[Kiran · Rating 4 out of 5]

In my opinion this book was quite interesting, the themes expressed in this book were exciting

[Louisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Didn't capture my attention, and not my type of book but overall, an interesting book.

[Megan · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very entertaining book, however in places I found it a bit bland. Loved the ending though!!

[Lillian Watt · Rating 1 out of 5]

this book is horrid, wHY WAS IT EVEN PUBLISHED

[Jane Warne · Rating 4 out of 5]

An exciting read which transported me to another world. I loved the protagonist' attitude and language. It was funny, moving and took me back to adolescence.

[Josephine · Rating 3 out of 5]

The storyline was satisfactory, I was more interested in the second story, as in the log books in their house.

[Mark Gee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great read. Well-written - characters, plot lines etc.

[Christina Trotter]

Great read. Really made you think about life and how a flip of a coin can change your life in an instant

[Sam · Rating 2 out of 5]

It was ok

[Anthea · Rating 4 out of 5]

it was good