The River We Remember by William Kent Krueger

 

The novel I read this evening was pretty much the opposite of Annihilation: There's barely any weirdness in it (just a possibly-haunted stretch of riverbank) but the characters' interior lives are clear and drive their actions in ways that VanderMeer either doesn't care to write about or can't manage to capture. Kreuger knows the people of the northern Plains--all the people and peoples. This is mostly a crime novel, but it has a handful of threads in it, lots of (mostly at least somewhat damaged) characters.  It's set in the late 1950s, so even the good people in it are variously struggling with things that most of us (at least until a few years ago) would have considered mostly solved, which serves as a reminder of what might be lost. Thematic concerns abound, here: secrets, honestly, forgiveness, the differences between people who break and people who bounce back.