Southern California News Group “Books You’ll Want to Read” selection
Foreword Reviews “Book of the Day” selection
“Unique and intriguing. . . . In Not Long Ago Persons Found, demonstrable evidence of facts does not serve as the bedrock of what is presented by authorities as the truth. . . . These lessons, and this novel, are both important and timely.” —PopMatters
“Refreshing. . . . If one reads the novel as an allegory, it changes the reader’s perspective.” —North of Oxford
“Harrowing, tautly plotted. . . . A tense, claustrophobic detective tale about the toll exacted on people trying to uncover the truth.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Feverish. . . . Long bonds fracture as national façades crumble and entrenched cruelties are revealed in the startling dystopian novel Not Long Ago Persons Found.” —Foreword Reviews
“Haunting, gorgeous, mysterious, propulsive—a novel as brilliant about currents of violence as it is about the flow of tree pollen through the air and rivers. As I heard echoes of Coetzee and Didion and a music that is all Osborn’s own, I wanted to turn the pages even faster, to learn what would happen next and, at the same time, to slow down and linger on the masterful prose. A stunning accomplishment.” —Heather Abel, author of The Optimistic Decade
“An astonishing achievement, Osborn’s first novel explores imaginary territories that echo of places, countries, and conflicts we recognize, in the manner of Jim Crace and Italo Calvino, but does so with forensic precision.” —Susan Daitch, author of The Lost Civilizations of Suolucidir and The Adjudicator
“J. Richard Osborn’s fever dream of a novel brings us into a shadowy world that feels eerily familiar. Riveting and deeply unsettling, Not Long Ago Persons Found dramatizes just how Byzantine the quest for justice has become in our time.” —Askold Melnyczuk, author of The House of Widows and The Man Who Would Not Bow
“J. Richard Osborn’s near-future world is a menacing mix of science, superstition, and governmental treachery as an edgy couple goes deep undercover to investigate a boy’s horrific murder. Not Long Ago Persons Found is exceptionally fast-moving and suspenseful.” —Sharyn Skeeter, author of Dancing with Langston
“Part ghost story, part scientific disquisition, and part political intrigue, Not Long Ago Persons Found is a gripping, Borgesian allegory of our futile attempts to see between things—between peoples, places, and ‘through gaps in the trees’—in order to find truth and meaning in a world that resists determinacy.” —Peter Matthiessen Wheelwright, author of As It Is On Earth and The Door-Man
2025-03-22
Fighting for the innocent might put you on the right side, but it doesn’t mean you’ll be safe.
When the mutilated body of a 7-year-old boy is found in the river of a big city, pollen and other debris on the corpse suggest he comes from a valley far away in a neighboring country. In Osborn’s unsettling debut, a biological anthropologist and her husband—who acts as her forensic team’s assistant, translator, and our narrator—get sent south by their agency to collect plant and mineral samples to confirm the boy’s identity. Their efforts overlap with the gruesome discovery of a mass grave, and the couple’s attempt to go home with the samples gets blocked by the country’s new regime. Why do they care about the child? Who is in the mass grave? Are these deaths somehow related? Osborn keeps a tight leash on the action as the couple seeks answers. They encounter a host of menacing characters in an unnamed country with a violent history that local officials dismiss. (“That is all in the past. It is over. That does not happen in the present time.…We are progressive!”) Conversations and the narrator’s commentary are restrained and opaque, often to a frustrating degree. “What’s happening to us?” the anthropologist demands of someone helping them. “Oh, you’ll need to find that out for yourselves” is all he’ll say. It’s clear Osborn wants readers to feel the same way while the couple searches for the murderer and possible motives. That search involves jungle treks, interrogation rooms, government double talk, and absurd bureaucratic dead ends worthy of Beckett or Kafka. All of this makes the pair burn for justice and feel “increasingly angry, against [their] instincts for self-preservation.” They resist the sensational conclusions of the authorities, locals, and even their superiors that the child was a victim of some strange ritual. Though the body’s dismemberment and objects found among the boy’s things seem to support that theory, the couple insists there’s a more sinister explanation. That insistence might put at risk their jobs, their relationship, and even their lives, but what haunts them more is the thought of giving up: “What are we if we let this go?” That’s a question neither wants to answer in this harrowing, tautly plotted story.
A tense, claustrophobic detective tale about the toll exacted on people trying to uncover the truth.
