The River King

The setting is Hadden, Massachusetts, which is also the name of the town's elite boarding school, and the river that runs through them both. Here we encounter a large and compelling cast of characters, both townies and Hadden School faculty and students, all of them caught up in a mystery that revolves around a death that seems to be a suicide. In what often feels like literary sleight-of-hand, Hoffman brings her players on stage to play their scenes with such grace that you almost forget that you haven't known them for years.
The story is stitched together by the threads of two loves. One thread connects local cop Abel Grey, a tall, handsome loner and a self-confessed emotional recluse, to photography teacher Betsy Chase, the woman who unwittingly brings him out of hiding. The other thread connects two students, Carlin Leander, a fine looking, dirt-poor, independent-thinker-of-a-girl attending Hadden on a swimming scholarship, and Gus Pierce, a hopelessly homely renegade of a boy, half Holden Caulfield and half Borstal Boy. Of equal importance to the novel are the ghosts who haunt this story, including Annie Howe, the long-suffering wife of a former headmaster at the school, and Abel's kid brother, whose death at 17 was also suspicious. But most importantly, there is the recently deceased, who shows up in Betsy Chase's photographs as a shimmering aura.