Where The Five Began
I often read a news article and think, that would make a great novel. It's never more than a seed — a spark that starts the conversation but doesn't write the story. That's exactly how The Five began.
The case that started it was the Yuba County Five: five young men who vanished together in the mountains of Northern California, their abandoned car found with no explanation. Some of them survived for months out there. Decades later, the full truth of what happened still hasn't been settled, and that unresolved quality — the not-knowing — is what stayed with me long after I closed the article.
What I took from the case wasn't the specifics. It was the emotional premise underneath them: five disappearances that leave a decade-long wound. A community that never gets to put something down because it never knows what happened.
The Five borrows that shape but tells its own story. Like the Yuba County case, it follows a group of five young men who disappear together, leaving families and a whole community with years of unanswered questions. The setting does similar work — instead of a mountain range swallowing evidence, my boys disappear during a cross-country run in the fictional town of Myrtle, Massachusetts, and the landscape becomes part of what makes the mystery so hard to solve. Both stories sit inside the same kind of uncertainty, too: conflicting clues, incomplete explanations, an absence that resists closure. But where the real case remains genuinely open, my novel takes that foundation somewhere deliberate — into a conspiracy and a cover-up. And where the real Yuba County Five's belongings and remains surfaced gradually over the years, in my novel it's Tobey's body reappearing after ten years that reopens everything.
The biggest departure is in who these young men are and why they vanished. The Yuba County Five were adults, and to this day their movements and motives remain uncertain. My missing runners are high school athletes, and their disappearance isn't a mystery of the choices they made — it's the result of choices other people made for them. That shifts the whole shape of the story from a search for an explanation into something with an active investigative engine: CC and Rick digging through institutional protection, political interference, concealed deaths, and witnesses who survived and stayed silent.
If I'm honest, the hardest part of writing this was the ethics of it — building a fictional story out of pieces of something real. I didn't want to borrow the Yuba County Five's tragedy and marginalize it to serve a plot. What I wanted was to use that emotional truth — what happens to a community when a group of young men disappears — to write something that stands on its own. I hope I've done that with the respect it deserves.