When Jace Wilson accidentally witnesses a brutal murder, his life is changed forever. An ordinary teenager growing up in Indiana, Jace is suddenly forced into the Witness Protection Program and given a new name and history. Taken in by a couple ho run a wilderness program for young boys, Jace finds himself hiking through the Montana mountains, tortured by his memories and by the fear that he'll never be safe again.
The killers, known as the Blackwell Brothers, are two of the most heinous criminals the country has ever known. Jace was the one person to catch them in the act, and he slipped through their fingers. Now they've tracked him down and are making their way across the country, ruthlessly slaughtering anyone who gets in their way.
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Though he cut his teeth as a crime writer, ten years and the same number of novels into his creative career, Michael Kortya, more than any other author, appears poised to succeed or at the very least equal Stephen King.
Like the fiction of the modern-day Dickens, his work is eminently accessible, remarkably natural, cannily characterised, and it tends, as well, towards the speculative end of the spectrum. He's told spooky stories about haunted mineral water, wicked weather and whatnot, but the fantastic is not his only focus—again along the lines of the aforementioned master—and Koryta is no less capable when it comes to writing about the world we know, as Those Who Wish Me Dead demonstrates.
It's about a boy; a boy who witnesses a nightmarish murder after daring himself to dive into the water at the bottom of a quarry. Thanks to some quick thinking, Jace escapes the scene of the crime with his life that night, but the killers catch a glimpse of him—and just like that, the infamous Blackwell brothers are on his back. If they find him, he's finished, so his parents do the only thing they can do: they hide him. And what better place to squirrel away a well-to-do kid from the city than amongst a bunch of badly behaved boys in the mountains of Montana?