Thief River Falls is a mystery thriller novel by bestselling author Brian Freeman. Published in 2020, the book takes place in the real town of Thief River Falls, Minnesota and includes the names of real locations in the town. Another novel by Freeman is The Night Bird.

Plot Summary

Main character Lisa Power is the author of four thrillers. Her fourth and most successful novel is named after her hometown in northwestern Minnesota. About two years before the book begins, Lisa lost most of the members of her family. Her mother died in a car accident, and her father and three youngest brothers died tragically over the course of the next six months. Later, Lisa’s twin brother Noah abandoned Lisa abruptly, unable to deal with his grief.

The novel opens with Lisa returning home one night to the farmland where she lives outside of town. That night, two deputies come around and knock on Lisa’s door. Lisa hides, not wanting the deputies to know she is home. Later that night, a 10-year-old boy appears in Lisa’s yard. The boy can’t remember his name or where he came from but believes he witnessed a brutal murder and that the police are searching for him and want to kill him. Lisa promises to help the boy and names him Purdue after the boy of a similar age from her novel. Over the next two days, Lisa does her best to hide Purdue while searching for clues about how he ended up in her yard. Lisa turns to her best friend Laurel and Laurel’s husband Curtis. Lisa asks Curtis, who owns a small plane, to fly her and Purdue to Minneapolis where she can speak to an FBI agent. However, Curtis takes them to Thief River Falls instead. Lisa starts to suspect she can’t trust Laurel and Curtis. As more clues reveal themselves, Lisa believes the county attorney of Thief River Falls, Denis Farrell, was involved in the killing Purdue witnessed. Lisa has never gotten along with Denis because she was once engaged to Denis’s son, Danny. Unfortunately, Danny died ten years earlier while working as a firefighter in California.

As Lisa unravels more clues, she believes Denis’s daughter Fiona was being stalked by an abusive ex-husband. Lisa suspects that two nights earlier, Denis and his accomplices tracked down the ex-husband and killed him. Purdue, hiding in the grass nearby, saw what happened. When Denis realized the boy had witnessed the murder, he tried to kill Purdue too, but Purdue escaped.

As Lisa continues to run from local authorities, she ends up hiding out in a church by the railroad tracks. She plans to distract the police while Purdue sneaks out of the church, jumps onto an oncoming train, and escapes into Canada.

In a twist, it is revealed that Purdue isn’t real and that Lisa has hallucinated him. In reality, Lisa and Danny had a ten-year-old son together, Harlan, who died two nights before Lisa’s hallucination from cancer. Lisa’s hallucination was an unconscious reaction to the death of her son. As Lisa tried to help Purdue, she was hallucinating the events of her novel into existence, which included many of the same names and places as real locations in the town of Thief River Falls. In truth, neither Fiona nor Purdue exist, and a brutal murder never took place. It is also revealed that Laurel is actually Lisa’s psychiatrist, whom Lisa has been seeing for about two years.

Sensing she is in danger, Lisa’s twin brother Noah appears at the church in Thief River Falls just in time to save her. By the end of the novel, Noah and his fiancée have decided to return to Thief River Falls, and Lisa is recovering in the hospital.