THE RIVER WE REMEMBER

The bestselling author of This Tender Land and Ordinary Grace returns with his third standalone novel.

In 1958, Jewel, Minnesota is a quintessential American small town, but the suspicious death of a wealthy farmer exposes the dangerous fault lines that run just beneath the surface, reshaping the lives of the town's sheriff and a sensitive young boy in heartbreaking, unexpected ways.

"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. Because we are only one part of the whole, the river each of us remembers is different, and there are many versions of the stories we tell about our past."

When Jimmy Quinn's body is found on the banks of the Alabaster River in May, 1958, nobody mourns him. The wealthiest landowner in the county and a man of voracious appetites and no scruples, even his wife and children shed no tears. It falls to Sheriff Brody Dern to find out how the tyrant of Black Earth County ended up with a shotgun blast in his stomach, his body half-eaten by the voracious catfish that call the Alabaster home. In Jewel, Minnesota, the death of a man like Jimmy is a seismic event and speculation runs wild. Even before Brody has the results of the autopsy in hand, people are muttering that the murderer must be Noah Bluestone, a Native American man and WWII veteran who came back to Jewel a few years earlier with a Japanese wife, Kyoko.

For twelve-year old Scott Madison, a bookish, inquisitive boy whose father was killed in the war and whose mother runs the local diner, it's a confusing time as he and his best friend try to understand the unexpected violence that suddenly seems to be changing the contours of their town. Torn between loyalty to his friend and his own sense of morality, Scott will find himself caught up in the middle of the murder investigation, and possibly a target himself.

In this masterful portrait of small town American life in the 1950s, William Kent Krueger has created a spellbinding cast of characters - from the intrepid publisher of the local newspaper, to a woman whose sordid past threatens to overwhelm all the good she's done in recent years, to the town drunk who sees far more than anyone realizes, to a brilliant female lawyer who takes on Noah's defense when everyone else is convinced he is guilty. This is a compassionate, humane, and insightful novel about the secrets we most want to keep, the people we desperately try to save, and the stories we tell each other about the places we call home.