William Kent Krueger

Kruger has written a love letter to a place, and I suspect also to his wife and also a story that reminds us we have always been divided, that good people always needed to keep the racist, misogynist self-involved idiots in check. This murder mystery focused on a crime (or maybe a suicide) in a small Minnesota town is gripping and immersive and (I mean this in the best way) old-fashioned in its approach to storytelling. The preface is genius. Reading this made me think of East of Eden and Lonesome Dove. The book takes on big things and big men. As with East of Eden (and all Steinbeck) this is a VERY Christian novel that seeks to define what makes a person good and to examine why being good often has far fewer obvious rewards than being evil. It delves into the relationships between fathers and sons, husbands and wives, men and their land, and all with their neighbors. When reading my mind was filled with wide shots of trees, a winding river, and a couple of human forms perhaps, so small in this vista as to be almost invisible. The people, when spotted, are rugged individualists, haunted by events past and present they can choose to let define them, or they can look to the good but more fleeting things and work hard to let those lead the way.

I enjoyed this one a great deal, though Kruger draws characters that are either very good or very evil. This is something that bothers me, though here it must be said the good characters all have flaws though they many be minor ones and and the evil characters have moments of decency, though they may be fleeting. Also in the subject of overly simplified characters, Kruger drew the one major Native American character as the very large, stoic, wise one (think Chief in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest), and some nuance would have been very welcome. These things did not bother me much here because the plot, is more important than the character studies, but it bugged me a bit. Also, there were A LOT of characters, and I started to mix up the more minor ones. I think it would have helped to eliminate a few if the minor side characters. A 4.5 that I am going to round down, but it was nearly a 5.… (mer)