"River Deep"

Bryan Gruley is the Edgar-nominated author of seven novels and one award-winning work of nonfiction. A lifelong journalist, he shared in The Wall Street Journal's Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the September 11 terrorist attacks. A longtime Chicago resident, he now lives in northern lower Michigan with his wife, Pamela.

Gruley applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, River Deep, and reported the following:

On page 69 of River Deep, Bitterfrost Detective Garth Klimmek finds himself sprawled on a concrete walkway with a bloodied, possibly broken nose and pain radiating through a hip scheduled soon for full replacement.

He’s outside a Catholic Church where Catriona Dulaney is emerging from the funeral for her twin infant sons, Liam and Logan, whom Catriona is accused of drowning in Bitterfrost’s Jako River. The moral and legal trial Catriona is about to endure circumscribe the heart of River Deep.

This scene outside St. Henry’s Catholic Church is important because it establishes the dramatic fracture in Bitterfrost between townspeople wishing the worst on a woman they see as a murderer, and other locals who believe Catriona is merely the latest Dulaney to be persecuted by Bitterfrost’s wealthy elite, personified in the book’s other protagonist, the attorney Devyn Payne.

The division puzzles and frustrates Detective Klimmek, who has lived in this town for many years and believes he has witnessed a profoundly sad shift in how the residents get along--or don’t. He will return again and again to this thought, which in some ways mirrors the division that has rippled through the United States over the past decade.

The disturbance on page 69 also sets the scene for the emergence of an enigmatic new character, the one-eyed ex-cop Hooper. Hooper first appeared in my debut novel, Starvation Lake, as a teenage hockey player. Now’s he’s a bereaved itinerant who stumbles upon the death of the twin boys and will have a profound effect on later events in River Deep. It was a delight to write him again.

Learn more about the book and author at Bryan Gruley's website.

The Page 69 Test: Starvation Lake.

The Page 69 Test: The Hanging Tree.

The Page 69 Test: Bleak Harbor.

The Page 69 Test: Purgatory Bay.

The Page 69 Test: Bitterfrost.

Q&A with Bryan Gruley.

My Book, The Movie: Bitterfrost.

My Book, The Movie: River Deep.

--Marshal Zeringue