Too many memories

In The River We Remember, the fine 2023 novel by William Kent Krueger, it is not just the river that characters remember. Most of them have torn pasts they would like to forget. In many cases, that past involves their World War II experiences.

One of the characters is Sheriff Brody Dean, a war hero who doesn't feel like a hero. The year is 1958, and Brody is called to the bank of the Alabaster River, where the body of Jimmy Quinn, one of the most prominent, and least loved citizens of Jewel, Minn., has been found.

Brody would like to believe the shotgun death was either an accident or a suicide. If it was murder, he figures Jimmy Quinn probably deserved it. He wipes all prints off the shotgun to protect whoever might have done it.

Yet as much as everyone, including members of his own family, hated Quinn, there is someone they hate even more. That is Noah Bluestone, another war hero. But he is also a Dakota Sioux, and he married a Japanese woman. Soon evidence forces Brody to arrest Noah, against his own will.

There's much more going on in this novel. Brody carries on a long-term affair with his brother's wife, then falls for Angie, a former prostitute who runs a local diner in her new life. Unwise behavior by Angie's teenage son and his friend put them dangerously in the middle of this murder case. Both Noah and his wife refuse to talk about what really happened on the night Jimmy Quinn was killed.

This is a wonderfully written murder mystery that reads like a literary novel. Don't miss it.