If all goes according to plan, tonight will be Jack Current’s last. The young engineer is at the end of his emotional rope and plans to take his own life. But first, a bar crawl through his downtown Cincinnati neighborhood is in order.
Accompanying him during his final hours is a dollar store notebook. The Drunk Log. In it, he documents the evening, ruminates on his existence and remembers his 7-year-old nephew, who died exactly a year earlier. It is a loss for which Jack feels responsible — a lapse in judgement for which there is no forgiveness. Buckling under the weight of oppressive guilt, Jack plans to jump off the scenic suspension bridge spanning the Ohio River between Cincinnati and Covington, Kentucky.
Drunk Log, from Mark E. Scott, is a darkly humorous, deeply introspective exploration into one man’s attempt to find peace in the face of unrelenting pain. Told with a fast clip, the entire book covers about 8 hours and deftly avoids becoming an ominous dirge through relatable — and flawed — characters, unexpectedly funny situations, a budding romance and the wobbly balancing act of a man who must remain sober enough to write in his journal and finish what he started, but drunk enough to jump off a bridge.
Readers follow Jack as he begins the evening at his local watering hole, where a gregarious bartender named Aria, with whom he shares a mutual attraction, takes a surreptitious peek at Jack’s journal. Sensing Jack is headed to the same doom that claimed her sister, Aria decides to intervene.
Tracking him down in the middle of a winter storm, Aria finds Jack on the freezing, snowy bridge. Can they emerge from their individual cocoons of loss and suffering, save each other and rewrite their stories?
Drunk Log is the first installment in Scott’s three-part, Day in the Life series, in which the unexpected, twisted saga of Jack and Aria unfolds over a combined period of 24 hours.
Born in the small manufacturing town of Galion, Ohio, author Mark E. Scott lived in various burgs in Ohio and Michigan before joining the Navy and spending four years traveling the world aboard the USS Mount Whitney. Upon returning home to southwest Ohio, he enrolled at Miami University and completed a degree in Education, only to become a banker soon thereafter. Scott now lives happily in a condo in the Over-the-Rhine neighborhood of Cincinnati. In his free time, he enjoys writing, finding new and creative ways of tricking his children into answering their phones, and anything related to travel and outdoors, of late including tumbling down snow covered mountains while dragging otherwise perfectly good skis behind him.
For more information, please visit www.markescottauthor.com, or connect with him on Instagram, Facebook or Twitter.