The River We Remember

by William Kent Krueger ★★★★☆

Last year, I read my first (Ordinary Grace, ★★★★★) and second (This Tender Land, ★★★☆☆) books by William Kent Krueger. Ordinary Grace was thoroughly hyped, and deservedly so -- it spent time in my "Top 4 Books of the Year" for much of 2023, before gradually slipping down the list. This Tender Land didn't capture the same magic for me. So The River We Remember essentially becomes a tiebreaker: is Krueger someone I'll read regularly, or was Ordinary Grace an anomaly?

The novel opens on Memorial Day, 1958. Like all of Krueger's books, it is set in Minnesota, in a fictional small town (Jewel) along the banks of a fictional river (the Alabaster). As the town celebrates Memorial Day, a panicked townsman arrives to inform sheriff Brody Dern that he's just discovered the body of Jimmy Quinn floating in the Alabaster River. Quinn is one of the more prominent townspeople; he's also one of the least popular, leaving plenty of potential suspects among the people of Jewel. Brody goes to investigate the scene.

When I read the description for the book, I immediately thought "this sounds exactly like Ordinary Grace". There are definitely some commonalities -- set in a similar time and place, main characters dealing with post-traumatic stress, a coming-of-age story for a boy in his early teens, a local "Indian" (Krueger uses the language of the time) that is immediately suspected by the white townspeople when a crime occurs. While there are certainly some similarities, The River We Remember didn't feel nearly as derivative as I thought it was going to.

It's obvious from that opening that this will be a murder mystery; it's also clear in the early pages of the novel that the mystery is just a vehicle for Krueger to explore some weightier themes. The characters in The River We Remember are almost universally flawed, and all have secrets that they are harboring. The most prevailing theme is the post-traumatic stress of war -- none affected are handling it especially well, and most are truly struggling to deal with life after that trauma. The novel also tackles several other difficult topics, including racism, child abuse, and even incest. That list makes makes it sound like reading this is going to be a depressing emotional slog, but given the gravity of the underlying topics, this is not as challenging to read as one might assume.

Krueger has now written over twenty mystery books (most in his Cork O'Connor series), so you know he knows how to structure a quality whodunit, and that expertise in the genre is on display here once again. There are several possibilities that could makes sense for the who and the why of Jimmy Quinn's murder, and the ultimate reveal is believable without being obvious throughout. The expansion beyond the central mystery to explore several different significantly flawed characters adds additional depth that's not always found in the genre, and the characters' flaws make them some of the more multi-dimensional that Krueger has created.

This was a solid 4.5-star read for me, that combined a well-crafted mystery with respectable treatment of several challenging topics. I connected a bit more with Ordinary Grace, but this was a strong step up from This Tender Land, and a fitting addition to what Krueger unofficially refers to as his "Heartland Trilogy". Worth a read.