The River King was published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons in 2000. Gus Pierce, a scholarship student at the Haddan School (an elite New England boarding school), is found dead in the Haddan River. The official verdict is suicide. But Abel Grey — a local police officer from the town of Haddan, whose residents have always resented the school — suspects murder.
The novel is structured around the class divide between the school (wealthy, privileged, insular) and the town (working-class, proud, suspicious of outsiders). Gus was caught between both worlds — a scholarship boy, neither fish nor fowl. His death exposes the tensions that both communities have suppressed: the school’s culture of bullying and entitlement, the town’s history of resentment and violence.
Hoffman adds her characteristic element of the uncanny: the Haddan River itself seems haunted — a ghostly figure has been seen near its banks for generations, and Gus’s death awakens something in the landscape that refuses to let the truth remain buried. The mystery resolves not through police procedure alone but through the accumulation of secrets that small communities generate and the eventual impossibility of keeping them contained.
Collecting The River King
First edition (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 2000): Hardcover with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $15–$35
- Very good/very good: $8–$15