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.

A chase through Minnesota's Boundary Waters

William Kent Krueger says that writing Fox Creek, the nineteenth of twemty Cork O'Conner novels, was a different experience for him because he wrote the opening scene without knowing the story or where it would go. In earlier O’Conner books, he had a clear idea of the plot, the characters, and the key incidents in the mystery before he began writing. Not only did he not know what was going to happen in Fox Creek, he discovered he was writing a thriller rather than a mystery.

He says that in a mystery the readers and the protagonist are on the same page in terms of what they know about the crime and the clues. Ideally the reader solves the crime along with the protagonist. Sometimes the reader knows long before the detective who killed Roger Ackroyd. Sometimes the detective has to explain everything in the last chapter. 

In a thriller, readers typically know what the villain or villains are trying to do ahead of the protagonist who is trying to stop them. It’s not a question of who done it or why done it but will the protagonists, the people the reader cares about, understand what’s going on in time to prevent it from happening. “What drives a thriller,” he says, “is the suspense.”

In Chapter 1, a stranger hires O'Conner to find his missing wife, Dolores Morriseau, only reasonable because Cork is a licensed private investigator in Tamarack County in northern Minnesota. This is the fictional gateway to the pristine Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, a million acres of deep forest, a thousand lakes, and a few quiet towns. 

Within a few pages we learn that the stranger is not who he says he is; the woman he wants is on the run; Dolores, Cork's wife, and Henry Meloux, an elderly Ojibwa healer and woodsman have escaped into the wilderness; and three very bad men are chasing them and very bad things will happen to them if they're caught.

There are a couple mysteries: where is Dolores's husband? Why are the thugs willing to kill Cork's wife and Henry to capture Dolores? What's going on aside from Henry trying to keep the two women and himself alive? Henry knows the wilderness, but one of the three bad guys is a renegade tracker who also can read the wilderness—and is much younger than Henry.

To write much more risks spoiling Fox Creek for other readers, and I don't want to do that. I agree with Krueger that the book is more thriller than mystery. Yes, we don't know why the bad men want Dolores and her husband, but it almost doesn't matter. How will the villains be brought to justice? Read Fox Creek and find out.