Every bend hides a story. Every story has a cost.

Winter, 1964. Tom Crutchfield arrives in the barren coal fields of western Kentucky searching for the mother who abandoned him at birth twenty-one years ago. A semester shy of a college degree-and the comfortable future waiting in his father's construction firm-Tom is unsettled by a mysterious Christmas card that calls everything he knows into question.

His search leads him to the gray Ohio River, where two hunters have recently gone missing. As Tom digs into the case, he uncovers a tangle of secrets-hints of murder, corruption, and infidelity. Along the way, he finds love in a roadside beer shack, temptation in the trophy room of a betrayed spouse, and menace in a shotgun-wielding landlord who shuffles the grounds in blue slippers. Over it all looms a new boss, soaked in whiskey and marked by ink.

Through the lives of these people, Tom begins to see the lengths we go to protect the ones we love-and to hide the sins of our past. In telling the story of the missing men, he may finally uncover the truth about his own birth...and decide if forgiveness is possible.

Fans of the Southern lyricism of Ron Rash's The Caretaker will feel at home here. Or picture Craig Johnson's Sheriff Longmire-not on the Wyoming prairie, but in the Ohio River bottoms, armed not with a rifle but with a reporter's notebook-and you have Bend in the River.