The River We Remember

by William Kent Krueger

The River We Remember by William Kent Krueger is a rather beautiful and somewhat sad book set in 1958, in a fictional town (Jewel) in a fictional county (Black Earth) in Minnesota. The story opens on Memorial Day with one of the town’s leading men found in the Alabaster River, half-eaten by catfish after being killed by a shotgun. The investigation is led by the local sheriff, Brody Dern, but this is about the dynamics in a small town, so a variety of other characters feature as the plot unfolds.