Arlene Ridel is a comfortably off young housewife in Faber, Georgia, but she’s mourning a loss. To occupy herself, she asks for a basic job on the spur of the moment at the town police station. This leads to her studying a cold case file from two decades ago, THE NIGHT THE RIVER WEPT.
Living on the wrong side of town, beside Deck River, was hardship enough for a teen girl, so she set her mind on leaving and finding a good husband. Her boyfriend, the well-off sports star schoolboy Mitchell Wright, was the immediate suspect when three young brothers were found lying dead by the river. Arlene looks over the tragic files, wondering how anyone could leave the Broderick family’s children in appalling states of neglect. But when she tries talking to people, including other station staff, she meets a wall of silence. Either folks knew and felt bad that they didn’t help, or they grew up just the same way and don’t wish to admit it.
I have to admire Arlene for having the gumption to apply for a part-time job, but she might be taking work from someone who needs the money. Arlene just ignores Tommy, her perennially drunken husband, instead of warning him of the consequences if he keeps up his day-long alcohol intake. Arlene recently suffered a miscarriage, and Tommy is bound to be affected by this too. I thought they should be spending more quality time together instead of Arlene bagging evidence at the local police department. The lady has no authority whatsoever, as the creepy police chief tells her while staring at her body, yet she’s still allowed to access files, commandeer resources and question witnesses to murders and a suicide. There’s no crime in town, but nobody else is working the case. A lot feels wrong about this situation. The reader is constantly pulled away from the fact that the three young Broderick brothers were murdered to watch Arlene struggle with hosting a dinner party. A diary and first-person memories provide clues and shed some light on living conditions.
Lo Patrick is clearly paralleling Arlene’s loss of motherhood with the loss of the motherless boys. Her grief is openly spoken of, compared to the silence about the Broderick family. Maybe by trying to resolve the crime, Arlene is compensating for the former neglect, and maybe it would take a modern young woman, with a smartphone habit, to accomplish this task. THE NIGHT THE RIVER WEPT describes small-town isolation in casual, chatty terms, and seems to be stating that a lot needs to change, and women will lead the way. Lo Patrick previously wrote The Floating Girls, another small-town women’s fiction tale.
Everybody's got good and bad in them. In the end, it just depends which side wins out.
Arlene has lived in a small town on the edge of nowhere Georgia her whole life. Now married to her long-time high school sweetheart, Tommy, Arlene is itching to start a family and become the mother she always dreamed of being. But that's proving more difficult than she thought, and Arlene is desperate to find something to do to keep her mind off things. And get some distance from her husband, who is increasingly getting on her nerves.
As the summer gives way to a chilly, lonesome fall up in the mountains of northern Georgia, she takes a part-time job bagging evidence at the local police department, which involves about twenty minutes of actual work, and the rest of her shift she reads over old cold cases. One in particular fascinates her: the mysterious deaths of three young brothers murdered on Deck River, followed by the suicide of Mitchell Wright, the prime suspect in the murders.
Arlene becomes obsessed with the case, and with the help of the police department's receptionist and a family friend of the Wrights, she sets out on discovering the truth. She can't help but feel that if she solves the case of the Broderick boys' deaths, she'll find her footing in her young marriage and maybe find what she's been looking for all along.
From the author of The Floating Girls, a finalist for the Townsend Prize for Fiction and a Reader's Digest Editor's Pick, Lo Patrick has once again crafted a story bursting with charm, heartbreak, and memorable characters that leap off the page, a true delight for fans of Southern fiction.
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