What the River Keeps by Cheryl Grey Bostrom

What the River Keeps by Cheryl Grey Bostrom
Series: Standalone
Publisher: Tyndale Fiction (August 12, 2025)

REVIEW BY PRISCILLA BETTIS

In this contemporary women’s fiction novel, thirty-four-year-old Hildy is a wildlife biologist in the state of Washington. She knows a lot about rivers and trees and fish, especially fish. When Hildy was little, she told her dad she had met God in fish.

This is also a missing-person, cold-case story. Hildy’s dad went missing when she was a teenager. 

There’s something “off” about Hildy. For some reason, she doesn’t trust her memory. To record her days, she uses diaries, hangs odd mementos on her walls, and lines up rocks along the perimeter of her rooms:

“She extracted her latest stone from a row of rocks beneath her headboard. The diameter of a driveway cobble, it size-matched hundreds more crowding the space under her sofa and along her baseboards. Pebbles, both polished and rough, overflowed from galvanized buckets in three corners of her living space. Large or small, she’d assigned a number and a memory to each.”
-Cheryl Grey Bostrom, What the River Keeps

What’s going on in Hildy’s head? Is it simply that her dad went missing on one of his hikes through the forest, which would traumatize anyone, or is there something more sinister at play?

Oh yes, you know with a storyteller as talented as Bostrom that there’s definitely something more sinister going on.

When the bad guy (or gal, no hints from me) was revealed bit by bit, I almost stopped reading the book. Three times! I’ve read plenty of ghost stories and thrillers and the like, but this was scarier because it was so true to life, how another person can be so manipulative. So skillful at gaslighting. So sneaky. But there were already faith elements present in the book, and that gave me hope that there’d be healing for Hildy, forgiveness for the bad guy (and maybe redemption?). I kept reading.

On a different note, I loved the research-driven details in this story. Hildy has a geeky job, and I learned a lot about the ecology of a river, the Pacific Northwest weather, even the life cycles of fish. Bostrom explains why biologists count fish and how they do it. It’s a big undertaking requiring a team of scientists, wetsuits, underwater cameras, and underwater writing capabilities. These types of scenes were info-packed as well as beautiful … and tense, with danger lurking in each eddy or just beyond the next bend in the river.

The only con for me is I didn’t need the epilogue. I was content, happy even, with the way the last chapter ended. I didn’t want a peek into the future. It felt like Bostrom did that just to tie everything up in a neat bow. However, I know some readers do like to know for sure what eventually happens, so I’m only taking off half a fish.

A  beautifully written, seriously good book that addresses past hurts with a healing balm that only our great God can provide. Four-and-a-half fish!

I read What the River Keeps through NetGalley.