One for the Books: Master storytellers at their best

Two master storytellers have created recent works with strong characters, vivid settings, and engrossing mysteries. Each involves a uniquely American community of interesting, flawed people. These books aren’t just good; they’re great. I think both men and women will like them. And (hint, hint) they’d make great gift ideas for just about any reader.

“The River We Remember” by William Kent Krueger is set in 1958 in Black Earth County, Minnesota. The author opens the book with a description of the riverside, and I was immediately captured by the writing: “On quiet nights when the moon is full or nearly so and the surface of the Alabaster is mirror-still and glows pure white in the dark bottomland, to stand on a hillside and look down at this river is to fall in love. … We love this place enough to die for it. Or kill.”