Review – River Bodies by Karen Katchur

(Note: I just realized I hadn’t finished this review. When I saw the date of the draft, I knew why. It was shortly after I began this review that my life changed following a frightening, horrible motor vehicle accident. However, more than five years later, I’m happy to get on with it–the review, I mean. After a long recovery, I did get on with my life, and am quite thankful I was able to.)

Today I finished reading Karen’s third book, River Bodies. This morning, as a matter of fact, when I should have been attending to so many other things.

The author sets many of her books (I think perhaps all?) in Pennsylvania, and it is clear she knows the area well. She also knows her characters equally as well, and pens a story rich in raw emotion and mystery.

When a body is found in the Delaware River, the clues to the victim’s demise are eerily similar to a murder twenty years earlier. Becca has returned to town to be with her dying father right as this whole mess is going down. Her old love is in charge of the case, and she is quickly drawn into it. Little by little, past secrets are brought to light, and the truth behind them is not what Becca has long believed.

Karen did a superb job with the sense of urgency and pending danger, the depth to her characters, and the underlying tension between the main characters. Having lived in Pennsylvania myself for more than thirty-five years, and close to the area where this story is set for nearly twenty-five of those years, I also recognized the deep sense of place Karen so successfully gives to her story.

If you like mystery, the sometimes twisted path of relationships, danger and suspense, you’ll enjoy River Bodies.

Also in the Northampton County series: Cold Woods, Spring Girls

More by the author: The Secrets of Lake Road, The Sisters of Blue Mountain, and The Greedy Three.