A mystery that flows as smoothly as the river it evokes

We see the body of Jimmy Quinn on page 15 of The River We Remember, William Kent Krueger's twenty-third novel. Quinn has taken a shotgun blast in the chest and dumped in the Alabaster River where vicious channel catfish fed on him.

It's 1958. No cell phones, no DNA, no internet and WWII and Korea memories are fresh. We're in the fictional Black Earth County, MN, just north of the Iowa line where Sheriff Brody Dorn lives above the jailhouse in Jewel, population 4,000. The Alabaster, the river we remember, flows through Jewel and is almost as much a character as the residents.

The area is rich in history. The Sioux massacred white settlers and the whites massacred the Sioux. That may have been after the Civil War, but some Black Earth locals keep the rage fresh, as they do toward blacks and Japanese. The last is particularly sensitive because Kyoko, whose family was vaporized by the Nagasaki A-bomb, is married to an Indian, a former Marine, who farms his family's land.

Jimmy Quinn was the biggest landowner in Black Earth County, a bully, a drinker, and, as we gradually learn, a serial pedophile. Few citizens are sorry he's dead. Indeed Sheriff Brody himself attempts to make Quinn's death look like an accident. But it wasn't.

I've just begun to hint at the novel's complexities, which involve the Quinn family, Brody and his family and his history, Angie Madison who is attracted to Brody and her son and her history, a middle-age lawyer, the newspaper editor, the town drunk, and the Creasy clan of reprobates. 

But for all the characters, for all the complexities, for all the individual stories, for all the shifts in point of view Krueger is able to keep the action moving clearly as surely as the Alabaster flows. He is able to evoke the natural world. From the Prologue: "On quiet nights when the moon is full or nearly so and the surface of the Alabaster is mirror smooth and glows pure white in the dark bottomland, to stand on a hillside and look down at this river is to fall in love."

He's also able to introduce a tincture of philosophy. From the Epilogue: "Our lives and the lives of those we love merge to create a river whose current carries us forward from our beginning to our end."

A superior mystery.