The Dying of Mortimer Post Cover (actual)

Mortimer Post is the quintessential product of late-'60's middle America. He is a college-bound physics major from a good family, engaged to his high-school sweetheart, and is at the forefront of his version of the American dream. Then, in twelve short minutes, he faces a loss so devastating it marks the end of his living and the beginning of his dying. But as the opening sentence suggests, some deaths take longer than others. Mortimer's takes a lifetime to complete; a lifetime best described not as a series of unfortunate events, but a series of unbearable tragedies.

Spanning four of America's most significant decades, The Dying of Mortimer Post takes the reader from the protagonist's coming of age in the Pocono Mountains to the massacre of Vietnamese civilians at My Lai. After the searing end of his military career, the reader accompanies Mortimer on a nationwide quest for understanding and healing. On this journey of discovery, he finds both happiness and sorrow in the backwoods of rural Mississippi, then a much darker side of himself on the unforgiving streets of south central Los Angeles. Only when he has lost everything and is finally ready for the release of death, does Mortimer discover that he already has the one thing he's spent a lifetime seeking, and with it, the chance to finally live again.

At once exciting, poignant, and disturbing, The Dying of Mortimer Post reveals the innermost of the title character in an almost Gump-like manner as he struggles to make sense of a senseless world. A true epic, it is part love story, part war chronicle, part police saga, and all tragedy, but more than anything, is a tale of redemption in a world where the very concept has ceased to exist.