Ordinary Grace
by William Kent Krueger
Summary
New Bremen, Minnesota, the summer of 1961: Frank Drum is thirteen, a Methodist minister's son with a knack for being where he should not, and the summer will hand him four deaths, accident, nature, suicide and murder, before it lets him go. Krueger opens with the first, a boy killed on the railroad tracks, and lets the season darken by degrees, the valley's swimming holes and back roads acquiring their shadows one at a time, until the death that detonates the family: Ariel, Frank's gifted older sister, Juilliard bound, golden, found in the river.
The novel runs the investigation, suspicion falling along the town's fault lines of class and prejudice, the Native American drifter living down by the river, the wealthy family whose son loved Ariel, the secrets a small town's surface tension holds down, but its true instrument is the Drum household under load. Nathan Drum, the father, a war scarred man who came home to the ministry instead of the law, must pastor a grief he shares, and his faith under pressure, neither mocked nor spared, is the book's spine; Ruth, the mother, who never signed up for a minister's portion, rages toward her own reckoning; Jake, the stammering younger brother, watches everything and delivers, late, the book's most devastating grace note. Frank narrates from forty years on, the man measuring what the boy saw.
The title is the argument: the awful grace of God, Aeschylus by way of a Minnesota pulpit.
Around three hundred pages.
Best for readers who want the crime novel and the coming of age elegy fused completely, Mockingbird's territory claimed for the upper Midwest.
Historical Context & Significance
Ordinary Grace won the Edgar for Best Novel in 2014 and became that rarity, an award winner that kept selling for a decade: word of mouth, book clubs and school adoptions kept it selling year after year, standing as the modern model of the literary crime standalone.
William Kent Krueger had spent fifteen years building the Cork O'Connor series, Minnesota procedurals with their own devoted readership, before this departure; he wrote it, by his account, as the book he had been circling his whole career, and its success licensed the follow ups in the same register, This Tender Land becoming a bestseller phenomenon of its own.
The Edgar came with the year's sweep of readers' awards, and the book settled into the strange category it effectively founded: shelved in mystery, taught in schools, pressed on people who say they do not read mysteries, the genre's ambassador to the book club republic.