The River We Remember

 The River We Remember is the third William Kent Krueger novel reviewed in this blog, all three of which have been given rave reviews. Considering that this novel is his 24^th, released in 9/2023, there’s a lot of excellentR reading ahead for us. This story takes place in fictional Jewel, Minnesota. Unlike the 19-book Cork O’Conor series, this is a standalone book. It’s a story of multigenerational dysfunction, a story of many broken people who are fighting their own demons while mostly trying to find a way to live in this complex world. It takes place mostly in the 1950s with time spent on the backstories of these troubled people. The protagonist, Sheriff Brody Dern, is a war hero although he’s terribly conflicted about his war activities. He investigates the murder of Jimmy Quinn, the biggest land owner and wealthiest man in Black Earth County. Quinn was also the most hated man in the county as the result of his great appetites for money, land, control, and sex. The first suspect according to almost anyone else in the county besides Dern was Noah Bluestone, a Native American and WWII veteran who, at the end of his 20-year military career, moved back to Jewell with a young Japanese wife. Being non-white people, Noah and his wife were both automatically seen as enemies of the local population. There were multiple subplots, and I did not see the ending coming until it happened. This book has already won numerous awards, and Krueger is a writer to be admired and for his work to be greedily consumed. Fortunately, there is a rich body of work here to be savored.