54 pages • 1 hour read
Matt RichtelA Deadly Wandering
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2014A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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BetaChapters 15-18Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 15 Summary: “Terryl”
After college, Terryl met a girl named April at a church group. They quickly became best friends, and when April was diagnosed with leukemia, Terryl reevaluated her life’s direction. She spent time by April’s bedside, admiring the way April’s husband Neal was the model caregiver. Terryl took a Mormon mission to Costa Rica in April’s stead, fulfilling her best friend’s long-time dream.
Terryl returned from the mission ready to leave the baggage of her past behind. She got married and moves to Logan, Utah, where she worked as a victim’s advocate in the county prosecutor’s office.
In an alleged rape case, Terryl got more involved than the typical victim’s advocate. Taking on almost an investigative role, Terryl uncovered that the guilty man was the victim’s father, which led to his arrest.
Chapter 16 Summary: “The Neuroscientists”
Dr. Atchley, a Kansas University psychologist, walks his dogs and thinks about a question a student asked him about the validity of intelligent design. Originally, he labeled it pseudoscience, but later he sends a clarifying email to the student, the gist of which is that faith is the antithesis of science.
Growing up in Silicon Valley when Moore’s Law was driving computer power to double every two years, Atchley was fascinated by computers and dreaming of working as a botanist on a space station. Now, Atchley has “awoken from his own blind faith in technology” (141) and now pursues the question of technology’s addictiveness.
At a conference, Atchley and Gazzaley attend a talk about how the ubiquity of mobile devices is affecting us. Atchley keeps his laptop closed so it won’t tempt him toward distraction.
Chapter 17 Summary: “Terryl”
At the end of 2006, Terryl approaches Jackie outside gymnastics. Jackie and her children are still struggling to deal with Jim’s death, and “media seemed to help” (148).
Terryl takes her family to a condo owned by her friend April’s widower Neal, who made a lot of money founding several technology companies that were acquired for billions of dollars each. They visit an orphanage and give makeshift hygiene kits to the kids.
Terryl remains haunted by the abuse she suffered in her youth. She has had PTSD ever since Danny took her youngest brother Mitchell away from her. In 1998, she panicked in a mall because she thought she’d lost one of her kids. Six years earlier, Terryl reconnected with her biological father, Woody Hartman. It turns out that her mother had lied about him not wanting to be involved in her life: Woody tells Terryl that he’d sometimes call to try to talk to her, which explains one of the mysteries of her childhood—why she wasn’t allowed to answer the phone. The pain of this unfulfilled relationship now informs Terryl’s empathy for children who’ve lost their own parents, including Jim’s children and Keith’s daughter Megan.
Megan gets married in 2007, two years after her father’s death. It’s a rocky marriage, though the couple bond over the video games they play together. Eventually, Megan is arrested after a physical altercation with her husband.
Chapter 18 Summary: “Hunt for Justice”
Rindlisbacher gets access to Reggie’s cell phone records and calls Leila O’Dell to tell her that he’s pursuing the texting-and-driving angle. Leila can’t believe it. She recalls that a state senator works at her lawyer’s firm. It is still only the seed of an idea, but Leila will eventually need to do something positive with her grief and thinks maybe the senator can help.
Chapters 15-18 Analysis
These chapters emphasize the importance of channeling grief into positive ends. Inspired by the example of her friend April’s husband Neal, who becomes a devoted caretaker of his dying wife, Terryl uses her childhood trauma as fuel for her career in victims’ rights and advocacy. Not content to do the minimum, Terryl often takes matters into her own hands above the call of her job: Just as she investigated an alleged rape until she discovered the guilt of the victim’s father, so she approaches Jackie without waiting to be contacted. Terryl’s initiative echoes that of Leila, who seizes on the fact that she has a tenuous link to a state senator—a person who might be able to affect change legally.
In Chapter 16, Richtel returns to the interaction between Moore’s law (the principle that computing power doubles every eighteen months to two years) and Metcalfe’s law (the idea that a network value is the square of the number of users in that network). The combination of these computing axioms warrants caution about “a new kind of pressure on the human brain: Moore bringing increased information, ever faster, and Metcalfe making the information so personal as to make the gadgets extraordinarily seductive, even addictive” (144). In other words, Richtel is pointing out the danger of exposing our limited attention capacity to technologies “that can so overtake our attention systems as to be addicting” (145).
