Starred Review
William Kent Krueger arguably is one of Minnesota’s finest crime novelists to come along. His long running Cork O’Conner series is as fine of writing you will read. Kent Krueger has now been occasionally gifting us with some side work, Ordinary Grace and This Tender Land, and don’t forget the fine prequel Lighting Strike which blew me away. Devoured it.
Never getting comfortable seems to be Kent Kruegers hard scrabble Minnesota roots. Much like our way of life and embracing our brutal winters, Krueger tackles southern Minnesota in the late 50’s. See there is nothing sexy in this area of the state. It is featureless farm land. Wavy landscape, beautiful on a Spring morning, but nothing to set a novel in. Except Krueger who is always stretching his prose says wait a minute, and creates a crime noir, police procedural, unlike his previous writing that blooms beauty in an otherwise boring featureless landscape. The smell, the vibe, the people are drawn out.and given a certain reality that’s hard to write. Somehow Krueger does this effortlessly. Made me almost feel I was reading a Jame Lee Burke novel. Sheriff Dern almost had me thinking he was Robicheaux.
In this rare novel Krueger works his characters by exposing their insides and examines them in a slow burn of a novel. However do not take this the wrong way. Clearly he does this intentionally to build the tension, but also to the readers delight places you inside the novel to see how your own humanness is the same as the characters spread throughout.
Brody Dern is the Sheriff old Black Earth County in Southern Minnesota. Late 1950’s post World War 2 and Korea is still fresh on everyone’s minds and the scars theses men and women carried. Krueger really does exposes the era so well you feel placed into his writing as not only and outsider looking in, but in the farmland your self. Incredible talent for a novelist. A town bully who takes what he wants and pushes people around, also quite the drinker, is found dead in a river that flows gently through the land. Gruesome and violent Dern has to unpack how he got there. Late 1950’s we still held many prejudices for minorities and again with grace and skill Dern has to see through these themes find out how he died. Was it an accident or a murder?
Krueger, although it seems impossible to up his writing, sure has accomplished it with this brilliantly crafted crime novel. I believe it’s the most police procedural, crime noir he has written. Two final thoughts: certainly Dern needs more attention, and when does the streamers start producing Kruegers work to the television.
Early call. Novel of 2023.
https://www.amazon.com/River-We-Remember-Novel-ebook/dp/B0BTZZPHG4?ref_=ast_author_dp
