Six Stories

Podcast moderator Scott King, the protagonist of Wesolowski’s ragged debut, hosts a program called Six Stories, in which he interviews six people involved in a 20-year-old tragedy. In 1996, 15-year-old Tom Jeffries, one of a group of 15 teens on a weekend visit to Northumberland’s rugged Scarclaw Fell, disappeared. The son of the lord who owned the land around Scarclaw Fell, along with some friends, discovered Jeffries’s body in 1997. The first interviewee is 62-year-old Derek Bickers, one of the two adults who were on the trip; the second is Haris Novak, a childlike man from the nearby village of Belkeld. Through the stories of these men and four who were teens back then, King offers his listeners a picture of the group dynamics and clues to Jeffries’s puzzling disappearance and death. These different viewpoints on the same events don’t generate much suspense, nor do frequent references to two mythological monsters, the Beast of Belkeld and Nanna Wrack. The surprise ending comes as more of a disappointment than a revelation. (June)