Ordinary Grace - William Kent Krueger

This was the November book for the Deliberate Reader online book club, but despite putting a hold on it well in advance (in September!) I didn't get it until mid-December, so I kind of missed out on the discussion.  Still, I wanted to read it so I was read up for the year.

This is a sort of mystery, but it's not a pavement-pounding one or one where people are getting shot or anything like that.  Instead, the main character is a twelve-year-old boy whose town is plagued by a series of deaths, some of which may or may not be murder, over the course of one summer.  Starting with the suspicious but possibly accidental death of a boy who was hit by a train, the deaths affect main character Frank and his town in different ways.  Because his father is a local minister and his father's friend works to dig graves in the town, Frank has a front-row seat to the various deaths and becomes ever-more entwined in them, particularly when one hits close to home.

This is a pretty simple mystery, and despite a few red herrings the author placed I had it figured out pretty early on.  There were a few aspects that I hadn't guessed, but none of them actually affected the outcome at all.  However, this only pertains to one death--despite Frank building up the summer of five deaths, only one of them is really relevant to the story, and another is connected but not part of the mystery.  The others were very tangential, one of them being mentioned in about one sentence at the end of the book, as if the author had forgotten he needed to include another death to get his five until that point, and then threw it in just to be done with it.

I did quite like the writing here, however; the atmosphere of a small town in the sixties is really nailed down, and all of the characters felt fleshed-out, developed, and relevant to the plot in their own ways.  Not all of them were likable, but all of them felt as if they belonged and were serving their own purposes, and had lives beyond just serving the plot, which is definitely not always the case in mysteries.  However, because this book was also a "portrait of a town" book in addition to a mystery, having all of the characters fit so well was very important to the book working as a whole.  The one thing I didn't always like was the pacing; while at some times I was intrigued and pulled along by the pace of events, at other times the flow seemed to slow to a crawl, making chunks of the book seem like they were never going to end.  Still, I liked it overall, and as it picked up speed towards the end it made quite a good airplane read.  It finishes up with a sort of "where are they now" epilogue, though, which I really hate as a literary device; the epilogue could have been structured differently or, honestly, left off entirely, and the ending probably would have been more solid.

3.5 stars out of 5.