A review by bethreadsandnaps
Knife River by Justine Champine

4.25

Justine Champine's debut KNIFE RIVER (publishes May 28, 2024) shows the reverberations of a woman's disappearance on her teenage daughters. 

Main character Jess floats through life from girlfriend to girlfriend, but, when she's summoned back to Knife River after her mother's bones are potentially found, Jess has to confront the mystery around her mother's disappearance 15 years ago as well as reconnect with her sister Liz and her high school flame Eva. 

This is a character study of how Jess and her sister Liz dealt with the disappearance of their mother. Liz refused to leave the family home, despite having wanted to go to across the country for college, and she chained herself to her job as a bank teller. Jess has much more wanderlust and doesn't want to be tied down in any way.

The ambiance of upstate New York makes the reader feel secluded, and much of it takes place during winter.

Two things that inhibited my enjoyment some: 
1. There is very little tension in this mystery. I want to feel propulsion to find the killer, and that was lacking with some pacing problems (a lot of languishing). 
2. The timeline in this didn't make sense. Now I had an ARC, and I'm hoping this is fixed in publication. And I think it can be easily fixed. "Present day" is 2010 in this story with the mother's disappearance happening 15 years prior (1995). The mother's birth year is 1965, which makes her 30 years old in 1995 - but she has a 19 year old and a 13 year old. That would make her a mother at 11 years old. But later in the novel it indicates she went missing in 2002. But if it's 15 years later, that would be 2017 instead of 2010. So hopefully the book will change "present day" to 2017. That would make everything work. 

I found this to be excellent debut, and I enjoyed this character-driven literary mystery. If you like a slower burn mystery, I think you'll like this one.