Published by Atria Books on September 5, 2023
The River We Remember offers crime fiction fans a balanced blend of plot and characterization. Rooted in dysfunctional families, the story is a murder mystery that sets up suspects who might have committed a murder that caused no great loss to the community. Set in rural Minnesota in the 1950s, the action takes place against a background of post-war hatred of the Japanese and ongoing hatred of Native Americans.
Brody Dern is the sheriff of Black Earth County. Brody saw too much death in the war. He holds himself responsible for a friend’s death and cannot forgive himself for his actions. He later escaped from a Japanese POW camp and regards himself as a coward for seizing the opportunity to escape. Brody is unmarried but is involved in a relationship that does not reflect well upon his character.
Jimmy Quinn is an abusive drunk. He is the county’s largest landowner and is wealthy and powerful for that reason, although he is almost universally despised. He is on his second wife, a relative of his first wife. A hereditary condition caused the death of his first wife and will soon kill the second. Quinn’s conduct with his other family members is appalling. It isn’t surprising that someone finally killed him.
A man comes across Quinn’s dead body in the Alabaster River. A shotgun blast opened holes Quinn’s body that made his innards accessible to hungry catfish. Surmising that the body floated downriver, Brody leads a search for the location at which Quinn entered the river. He finds Quinn’s shotgun in a large pool of blood near the river. Did he shoot himself, either accidentally or in the commission of suicide? In the absence of an explanation for how a man who lost so much blood could have entered the river under his own power, it seems likely that he was murdered.
Brody does his best to avoid drawing that conclusion. He doesn’t think it will be good for the county to search for a murderer who did the community a favor by dispatching Quinn. Circumstances (and the former sheriff’s persistent reminders that Brody has a job to do) nevertheless force Brody to undertake a murder investigation.
Community suspicion quicky focuses on Noah Bluestone, a Dakota Sioux who returned from the war married to a Japanese woman. His race and the race of his wife are two strikes against him in a community that doesn’t see the need for a third strike. Only the courageous publisher of the local paper stands up for Noah’s right to a fair trial. When ambiguous evidence seems to point to Noah’s guilt, he refuses to take any action to defend himself for reasons that become part of the underlying mystery.
Tyler Creasy is another abusive drunk. He’s certain that Noah killed Quinn because Quinn fired Noah and his wife from their jobs as farmhand and housekeeper. Creasy has a son named Del who is a good friend of a boy named Sam. The boys’ mischief forms a subplot that eventually merges with the main story. While subplots pile on other subplots, it is a credit to William Kent Krueger that the story never becomes confusing.
Romance provides additional subplots. Unaware of Brody’s messy romantic entanglement, Sam’s mother Angie would like to have a go at Brody. Like Brody, she has a dark backstory. Whether Brody will (or can) return her affection is a subplot that adds interest to Brody’s life. He’s a troubled man who, despite being haunted by regrettable decisions, is a reasonably decent individual. It is easy for a reader to want Brody’s participation in the story to end well.
The plot is complicated by the drama that infects multiple families who are important to the story. The reader will need to sort through a good bit of dirty laundry to learn whether Noah or someone else killed Quinn.
By the end of the story, other lives are placed in peril, giving rise to a couple of credible action scenes. The conclusion is not entirely happy. I respect Krueger’s willingness to write an honest story that doesn’t pander to readers who want their fictional worlds to be better than the real world. At the same time, the unhappy aspect of the novel is convenient in its creation of an ending that will improve the lives of other characters who will have earned the reader’s sympathy.
Quinn’s complexity is at war with his desire for simplicity. That conflict makes him interesting. The key women in the novel have all lived difficult lives but have all persevered. One became a lawyer who is appointed to defend Noah. The women of greatest importance to the story have managed to retain a sense of decency and compassion. They have a strength that the evil men who surround them lack.
That so many people with such tragic lives have all collected in a rural county in Minnesota might be hard to believe, but who knows the secrets harbored by people who live in remote locations? People do what they want to do, uninhabited by their violation of the values that their community professes to follow. I easily set aside my skepticism about the onrush of subplots so that I could enjoy a strong mystery that is populated by an abundance of well-developed characters.
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