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WELCOME BACK TO THE WORLD OF

CORK O’CONNOR

More than one million Cork O’Connor novels sold in the United States

Read in more than sixteen countries around the world

New York Times Bestseller

USA Today Bestseller

Heartland Independent Bestseller

WINNER Minnesota Book Award

WINNER Northeastern Minnesota Book Award

WINNER Dilys Award

WINNER Lovey Award

WINNER Anthony Award

“Cork O’Connor . . . is one of those hometown heroes you rarely see . . . anymore—someone so decent and true, he might restore his town’s battered faith in the old values.”

—New York Times

“One of today’s automatic buy-today-read-tonight series . . . thoughtful but suspenseful, fast but lasting, contemporary but strangely timeless. Krueger hits the sweet spot every time.”

—Lee Child

“Steeped in place, sweetly melancholic in tone, [the series] braids together multiple stories about love, loss, and family.”

—Laura Lippman

“A powerful crime writer at the top of his game.”

—David Morrell

“There’s a reason why William Kent Krueger is known as a writer’s writer. His stories are works of art, literary wonders that beautifully capture a sense of place while they deliver a powerful emotional punch.”

—Tess Gerritsen

“William Kent Krueger can’t write a bad book. . . . Everything you want in a great read: depth, action, and credibility.”

—Charlaine Harris

“Solid storytelling and intriguing characterizations combine for a sobering look at the power of family and faith and Native American culture. Krueger never writes the same book twice as each installment finds him delving deeper into Cork’s psyche.”

—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“[A] punch-to-the-gut blend of detective story and investigative fiction . . . as blistering and crucial in its indictments of contemporary evil as The Jungle.”

—Booklist (starred review)

A NOTE FROM KENT

“Where do I begin?”

That’s the question I’m asked most often by readers unfamiliar with my work. When they become aware that there are currently fourteen novels in the Cork O’Connor series, with more to come, they’re understandably a little daunted. I always have an easy answer. I simply tell them to begin at the beginning.

It seems to me that the best way to approach a reading of the books in the Cork O’Connor series is to think of the entire body of work as the saga of the Cork O’Connor clan. At the heart of every story, of course, is Corcoran Liam O’Connor, the former sheriff of Tamarack County, Minnesota, turned burger-joint owner, turned private investigator. But without his family and his friends as support, without the beauty of the great Northwoods as a backdrop, Cork would exist in a pretty bleak emotional vacuum.

There are two kinds of protagonists in a mystery series: static and dynamic. A static protagonist is one who never changes, never ages. Think Sherlock Holmes. You read one Holmes story and in every story you read thereafter, the great detective will be exactly the same character you’ve met before. Cork O’Connor is different. He’s a dynamic protagonist. He’s a man who ages, who changes, who is affected in many ways by the things that happen to him across the course of the series. The same is true for his family. When I began to write the manuscript for Iron Lake, the first novel in the series, I saw Cork as someone in his very early forties. Now I’m writing about a man in his midfifties. Readers have watched his children grow up. They’ve seen important characters enter and exit Cork’s life. Those who’ve followed the series from the beginning often tell me that they feel as if they’ve been on a long, intimate journey with Cork and his family, something I love to hear.

The seed of Cork’s character came to me long before I conceived the first story. This is what I knew: I was going to write about a man who was so resilient that, no matter how far life pushed him down, he would always bob back to the surface. And his name would be Cork. I believed then, and still do, the old saw “Write what you know.” I’m a family man, so I decided Cork would be a family man. I’m married to a blond attorney. So Cork was going to be married to a blond attorney. Many of Cork’s core values—justice, commitment, family—are my own. But Cork is not me. O’Connor, for example, is an Irish name. Krueger is decidedly German. Cork is Roman Catholic. I’m Methodist. Cork has Anishinaabe blood running in his veins. I have no Native heritage. Cork comes from a significant law-enforcement background. I spent a night in jail once. Across the course of the series, Cork and everyone in his family have grown in ways I never could have imagined in the beginning.

One other character deserves special mention: Henry Meloux. Meloux is Anishinaabe and a member of the Grand Medicine Society. He’s a healer who, at a recent point in the series, reached the century mark. Although he’s very old, he continues in many ways to provide the most vibrant energy in the stories. He’s Cork’s mentor, a man of wisdom, of riddles, of compassion, of courage, of humor. And he sometimes farts a lot. Meloux is one of those gifts that come to writers from another place in their consciousness. I love anticipating composing the scenes in which Meloux will play a part, because I know that these sections will require no rewrite. When I put pen to paper, what Meloux says and does is always exactly what he should say and do. It feels a little like magic.

Finally, the other two important characters in the stories are the Anishinaabe people from whom Cork is descended, and Minnesota’s great Northwoods. The Anishinaabeg—Ojibwe or Chippewa, as they’re also known—and their culture contribute significantly to the richness and complexity of the stories. And without the rugged beauty, isolation, and mystery of the North Country as setting, the stories would most probably have all the impact of a bubblegum card.

I love conceiving and writing the tales of Cork O’Connor and his family. I have no intention of stopping. As long as I have someone who’ll publish me and readers who’ll buy my work, I’ll continue my journey as a writer, and Cork and company will continue to stumble upon dead bodies and do their best to find out who dunit.

THE BOOKS

Published 1998

When an Ojibwe paperboy goes missing in a snowstorm and a local judge is found murdered, Cork O’Connor, the disgraced former sheriff of Tamarack County, can’t help being drawn into the investigation. While he struggles to understand what connects these two mysterious occurrences, he must also battle to regain his self-respect and fight to hold on to his disintegrating family. This was my multiple-award-winning debut novel, and I believe it’s an excellent introduction to the characters and the setting of the series.

CHARACTERS INTRODUCED

CORK O’CONNOR: Fortyish, disgraced former sheriff of Tamarack County, Minnesota, now owner of a burger joint called Sam’s Place, a man whose life is in a meltdown.

JO O’CONNOR: Cork’s wife, also fortyish, smart, tough, the first female attorney in Tamarack County; among her clients are the local Ojibwe from the Iron Lake Reservation.

ROSE MCKENZIE: Jo’s sister, thirtysomething and single, who helps care for the O’Connor children.

JENNY O’CONNOR: At thirteen, Cork’s eldest child.

ANNIE O’CONNOR: Cork’s eleven-year-old middle child.

STEVIE O’CONNOR: Cork’s only son, five years old.

MOLLY NURMI: A waitress and Cork’s lover.

WALLY SCHANNO: Current Tamarack County sheriff, a man with secrets.

HENRY MELOUX: A very old Ojibwe healer, member of the Grand Medicine Society, and in many ways Cork’s mentor.

AN EXCERPT FROM IRON LAKE

For a week the feeling had been with him, and all week long young Paul LeBeau had been afraid. Of what exactly, he couldn’t say. Whenever he tried to put the finger of his thinking on it, it slipped away like a drop of mercury. But he knew that whatever was coming would be bad, because the feeling was exactly like the terrible waiting had been before his father disappeared. Each day he reached out into the air with all his senses, trying to touch what was coming. So that finally, on that morning in mid-December when the clouds rolled in thick and gray as smoke and the wind screamed over the pines and tamaracks and the snow began falling hard, Paul LeBeau looked out the window of his algebra class and thought hopefully, Maybe it’s only this.

Shortly after lunch, word of the school closing came down. Students quickly put on their coats and shouldered their book bags, and a few minutes later the yellow buses began to pull away, heading onto roads that threatened to disappear before them.

Paul left the Aurora Middle School and walked home, pushing into the force of the storm the whole way. He changed his clothes, put on his Sorel boots, took five dollars from the small cashbox on his dresser, and left his mother a note affixed with a butterfly magnet to the refrigerator door. Grabbing his canvas newspaper bag from its hook in the garage, he headed toward his drop box. By two-thirty he was loaded up and ready to go.

Paul had two paper routes covering nearly two and a half miles. He began with the small business district of Aurora and ended just at the town limits out on North Point Road. At fourteen, he was larger than most boys his age and very strong. If he hustled, he could finish in just under an hour and a half. But he knew this day would be different. The snow had been accumulating at a rate of more than an inch per hour and the bitter wind that swept down out of Canada drifted it fast and deep.

He took the routes in the time when his father was drinking heavily and his mother needed money. Delivering the papers, especially on days like this that seemed impossible, was a responsibility he took seriously. In truth, he loved the storms. The energy in the wind and the ceaseless force of the drifting snow thrilled him. Where another boy might see only the plodding task ahead of him, Paul saw challenge. He took pride in his ability to battle against these elements, trudging through the drifts, leaning hard into the wind in order to complete the job expected of him.

He was an Eagle Scout. Order of the Arrow. Member of Troop 135 out of St. Agnes Catholic Church. He had made himself capable in a hundred ways. He could start a fire with flint and steel; hit a bull’s-eye with a target arrow at thirty yards; tie a bowline, a sheepshank, a slipknot; lash together a bridge strong enough to bear the weight of several men. He knew how to treat someone for shock, drowning, cardiac arrest, and sunstroke. He believed seriously in the motto “Be Prepared,” and often as he walked his paper routes, he imagined scenarios of disaster in Aurora that would allow all his secret skills to shine.

By the time he neared the end of his deliveries, lights had been turned on in the houses along the way. He was tired. His shoulders ached from the weight of the papers and his legs felt leaden from wading through knee-deep drifts. The last house on his route stood at the very end of North Point Road, a pine-covered finger of land that jutted into Iron Lake and was lined with expensive homes. The last and most isolated of the houses belonged to Judge Robert Parrant.

The judge was an old man with a hard white face, bony hands, and sharp, watchful eyes. Out of fear Paul treated him with great deference. The judge’s paper was always placed securely between the storm door and the heavy wooden front door, safe from the elements. Whenever Paul came monthly to collect for his service, the judge rewarded him with a generous tip and more stories about politics than Paul cared to hear.

The judge’s house was almost dark, with only the flicker of a fireplace flame illuminating the living room curtains. With the last paper in hand, Paul threaded his way up the long walk between cedars laden with snow. He pulled the storm door open, plowing a little arc in the drift on the porch, and saw that the front door was slightly ajar. Cold air whistled into the house. As he reached out to draw the door closed, he heard the explosion from a heavy firearm discharged inside.

He edged the door back open. “Judge Parrant?” he called. “Are you all right?” He hesitated a moment, then stepped in.

Paul had been inside many times before at the judge’s request. He always hated it. The house was a vast two-story affair built of Minnesota sandstone. The interior walls were dark oak, the windows leaded glass. A huge stone fireplace dominated the living room, and the walls there were hung with hunting trophies—the heads of deer and antelope and bear whose sightless eyes seemed to follow Paul whenever the judge asked him in.

The house smelled of applewood smoke. The sudden pop of sap from a log burning in the fireplace made him jump.

“Judge Parrant?” he tried again.

He knew he should probably just leave and close the door behind him. But there had been the shot, and now he felt something in the stillness of the house from which he couldn’t turn, a kind of responsibility. As he stood with the door wide open at his back and the wind blowing through, he glanced down and watched tendrils of snow creep across the bare, polished floor and vine around his boots like something alive. He knew that a terrible thing had happened. He knew it absolutely.

He might still have turned away and run if he hadn’t seen the blood. It was a dark glistening on the polished hardwood floor at the bottom of the staircase. He walked slowly ahead, knelt, touched the small dark puddle with his fingertips, confirmed the color of it by the firelight. There was a bloody trail leading down the hallway to his left.

Pictures from the manual for his First Aid merit badge that showed arterial bleeding and how to apply direct pressure or a tourniquet came to his mind. He’d practiced these procedures a hundred times, but never really believing that he’d ever use them. He found himself hoping desperately the judge wasn’t badly hurt, and he panicked just a little at the thought that he might actually have to save a life.

The blood led him to a closed door where a dim light crept underneath.

“Judge Parrant?” he said cautiously, leaning close to the door.

He was reluctant to barge in, but when he finally turned the knob and stood in the threshold, he found a study lined with shelves of books. Along the far wall was a desk of dark wood with a lamp on it. The lamp was switched on but didn’t give much light and the room was heavy with shadows. On the wall directly back of the desk hung a map of Minnesota. Red lines like red rivers ran down the map from red splashes like red lakes. Behind the desk lay an overturned chair, and near the chair lay the judge.

Although fear reached way down inside him and made his legs go weak, he forced himself to move ahead. As he neared the desk and saw the judge more clearly, he forgot all about the procedures for a tourniquet. There was nowhere to put a tourniquet on a man who was missing most of his head.

For a moment he couldn’t move. He felt paralyzed, unable to think as he stared down at the raw pieces of the judge’s brain, pink as chunks of fresh watermelon. Paul didn’t even move when he heard the sound at his back, the soft shutting of the door. Finally he managed to turn away from the dead man just in time to see the second thing that night his Scout training could never have prepared him for.

Published 1999

A beautiful country-western star lost in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness compels Cork O’Connor to begin a desperate search that will lead him on a chase through that vast wilderness along a trail strewn with dead bodies. In addition to furthering my own understanding of Cork and his family, I intended this novel as an exploration of pure suspense.

CHARACTERS INTRODUCED

SHILOH: A young country-western star of Ojibwe heritage, missing in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.

ARKANSAS WILLIE RAYE: Also a country-western star, stepfather to Shiloh, desperate to enlist Cork’s help in finding his stepdaughter.

LOUIS TWO KNIVES: An Ojibwe boy who may know how to locate Shiloh.

STORMY TWO KNIVES: Louis’s angry, protective father.

BOOKER T. HARRIS: FBI agent tasked with locating Shiloh.

AN EXCERPT FROM BOUNDARY WATERS

He was a tough old bird, the redskin. Milwaukee allowed himself the dangerous luxury of admiring the old man fully. He was smart, too. But way too trusting. And that, Milwaukee knew, was his undoing.

Milwaukee turned away from the Indian and addressed the two men sitting by the campfire. “I can go on, but the Indian’s not going to talk. I can almost guarantee it.”

“I thought you guaranteed results,” the nervous one said.

“I’ll get what you want, only it won’t be coming from him.”

“Go on,” the nervous man said. He squeezed his hands together and jerked his head toward the Indian. “Do it.”

“Your ball game.” Milwaukee stepped to the campfire and pulled a long beechwood stick from the coals. The end of the stick glowed red, and two licks of flame leaped out on either side like the horns of a devil held in Milwaukee’s hand.

The old Indian hung spread-eagled between two small birch trees, secured to the slender trunks by nylon cords bound about his wrists and ankles. He was naked, although the night was cool and damp enough to make his blood steam as it flowed down his skin over the washboard of his ribs. Behind him, darkness closed like a black curtain over the rest of the deep woods. The campfire lit the old man as if he were a single actor in a command performance.

Or, Milwaukee thought as he approached with the burning stick, a puppet who’d broken his strings.

Milwaukee grasped the long gray hair and lifted the old man’s head. The eyes flickered open. Dark almond eyes. Resigned but not broken.

“See.” Milwaukee brought the angry glow inches from his face. “Your eyes will bubble. Just like stew. First one, then the other.”

The almond eyes looked steadily at Milwaukee, as if there were not at all a flame between them.

“Just tell us how to get to the woman and I won’t hurt you anymore,” Milwaukee offered. Although he meant it, he’d have been disappointed in the Indian if he broke; for he felt a rare companionship with the old man that had nothing to do with the business between them but was something in their spirits, something indomitable, something the nervous man by the fire would never understand. Milwaukee knew about the old man, knew how he was strong deep down, knew the information they were after would never come from him. In the end, the living would still be ignorant and the important answers, as always, would reside with the dead.

The second man at the campfire spoke. “Gone soft?” He was a huge man with a shaved head. He lit a fat Cuban cigar with a stick much like Milwaukee held, and he smiled. He smiled because next to himself, Milwaukee was the hardest man he knew. And like Milwaukee, he tolerated the nervous man only because of the money.

“Go on,” the nervous man commanded. “Do it, for Christ’s sake. I’ve got to know where she is.”

Milwaukee looked deeply into the eyes of the old man, into his soul, and wordlessly, he spoke. Then he tipped the stick. The reflection of the fire filled the old man’s right eye.

The old man did not blink.

Published 2001

Cork O’Connor finds himself caught in the middle of deadly hostilities between the Iron Lake Ojibwe and powerful lumber interests intent on logging a forest area sacred to the Ojibwe. The battle becomes personal when Cork’s wife, Jo, and son, Stephen, are kidnapped. A story inspired by true events.

CHARACTERS INTRODUCED

JOHN LEPERE: A man of Native blood, bent on revenge.

GRACE FITZGERALD: A well-respected author and heir to the Fitzgerald shipping fortune.

SCOTT FITZGERALD: Grace’s young son, an asthmatic kid.

KARL LINDSTROM: Husband to Grace Fitzgerald, and the last of the Lindstrom family, once one of the great lumbering families in North America.

ISAIAH BROOM: Member of the Iron Lake Ojibwe and a Native activist.

AN EXCERPT FROM PURGATORY RIDGE

Corcoran O’Connor was pulled instantly from his sleep by the sound of a sniffle near his head. He opened his eyes and the face of his six-year-old son filled his vision.

“I’m thcared,” Stevie said.

Cork propped himself on one arm. “Of what, buddy?”

“I heard thomething.”

“Where? In your room?”

Stevie nodded.

“Let’s go see.”

Jo rolled over. “What is it?”

“Stevie heard something,” Cork told his wife. “I’ll take care of it. Go back to sleep.”

“What time is it?”

Cork glanced at the radio alarm on the stand beside the bed. “Five o’clock.”

“I can take him,” she offered.

“Go back to sleep.”

“Mmmm.” She smiled faintly and rolled back to her dreaming.

Cork took his son by the hand, and together they walked down the hallway to where the night-light in Stevie’s room cast a soft glow over everything.

“Where was the noise?”

Stevie pointed toward the window.

“Let’s see.”

Cork knelt and peered through the screen. Aurora, Minnesota, was defined by the barest hint of morning light. The air was quite still, not even the slightest rustle among the leaves of the elm in Cork’s backyard. Far down the street, the Burnetts’ dog, Bogart, barked a few times, then fell silent. The only thing Cork found disturbing was the smell of wood smoke heavy on the breeze. The smoke came from forest fires burning all over the north country. Summer had come early that year. With it had come a dry heat and drought that wilted the undergrowth and turned fields of wild grass into something to be feared. Lake levels dropped to the lowest recorded in nearly a century. Rivers shrank to ragged threads. Creeks ceased to run. In shallow pools of trapped water, fish darted about wildly as what sustained them rapidly disappeared. The fires had begun in mid-June. Now it was nearly the end of July, and still the forests were burning. One blaze would be controlled and two others somewhere else would ignite. Day and night, the sky was full of smoke and the smell of burned wood.

“Do you still hear it?” Cork asked.

Stevie, who’d knelt beside him, shook his head.

“Probably an early bird,” Cork said.

“After a worm.” Stevie smiled.

“Yeah. And he must’ve got that worm. Think you can go back to sleep?”

“Yeth.”

“Good man. Come on.”

Cork got him settled in bed, then sat in a chair near the window. Stevie watched his father a while. His eyes were dark brown, the eyes of his Anishinaabe ancestors. Slowly, they drifted closed.

Cork’s son had always been a light sleeper, awakened easily by noises in the night, disturbances in the routine of the household. He was the only one of the O’Connor children who’d needed the comfort of a night-light. Cork blamed himself. In Stevie’s early years, when the dark of his closet or under his bed first became vast and menacing, Cork wasn’t always there to stand between his son and the monsters of his imagination. There were times, he knew, when the monster was real and was Cork. He thought often these days of the words that ended the traditional marriage ceremony of the Anishinaabeg.

You will share the same fire.

You will hang your garments together.

You will help one another.

You will walk the same trail.

You will look after one another.

Be kind to one another.

Be kind to your children.

He hadn’t always been careful to abide by these simple instructions. But a man could change, and watching his son crawl back into his dreaming, Cork vowed—as he did almost every morning—to work at being a better man.

By the time Cork finally left Stevie to his dreaming, morning sunlight fired the curtains over the window at the end of the hallway. Cork thought of returning to bed for a little while, but chose instead to head to the bathroom, where he showered, shaved, splashed on aftershave, then looked himself over carefully in the bathroom mirror.

•   •   •

Corcoran Liam O’Connor was forty-seven years old. Part Irish, part Ojibwe Anishinaabe, he stood five feet eleven inches tall, weighed one hundred seventy-five pounds, and had brown eyes, thinning red-brown hair, and slightly crooked teeth. He suffered from mild rosacea that he treated with prescription ointment. In wet weather, his left shoulder—twice dislocated—was prone to an arthritic aching. He did not consider himself a handsome man, but there were those, apparently, who found him so. All in all, what stared back at him from the bathroom mirror was the face of a man who’d struggled to be happy and believed himself to be almost there.

He returned to his bedroom, a towel about his waist. The radio alarm had gone off and WIRR out of Buhl was playing Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Cork went to the dresser, pulled open a drawer, and took out a pair of black silk boxers.

Jo stirred. She took a deep breath but kept her eyes closed. When she spoke to him, the words seemed to come reluctantly and from a distant place.

“Stevie all right?”

“He’s fine.”

“Another fire’s started. Up in the Boundary Waters near Saganaga Lake.” She yawned. “I just heard it on the news.”

“Oh?”

“Get this. The guy who started it is a lobbyist for the tobacco industry. He was shooting off fireworks. In the Boundary Waters—can you believe it?”

“I hope they fine his ass big time,” Cork said.

“He’s a tobacco lawyer. He can pay from his pocket money.” The room was quiet. Bogart started barking again down the block. “I can feel you watching me.”

“What else?”

“I smell Old Spice.”

“Anything else?”

“If I had to guess, I’d say you’ve put on your black silk boxers.”

“What a detective you would have made.” He sat on the bed, leaned down, and kissed her shoulder.

“I was dreaming before the radio came on.” She rolled toward him and opened her eyes.

“What?”

“We were trying to fly, you and I. A plane we had to pedal. But somehow we couldn’t quite get it off the ground.”

Cork reached out and brushed a white-blond strand of hair from her cheek.

She reached up and drifted her hand down his chest. “You smell good.”

“Only Old Spice. You have pedestrian tastes.”

“And, my, aren’t you lucky.”

He bent to her lips. She let him kiss her but kept her mouth closed. “I’m all stale. Give me five minutes.” She slid from the bed. She wore a gray tank top and white cotton underwear, her usual sleep attire. “Don’t start anything without me.” She smiled coyly as she went out the door.

Cork drew back the covers, straightened the bottom sheet, fluffed the pillows, and lay down to wait. The bedroom window was open. Bogart had ceased his barking and the only sound now was the call of a mourning dove perched in the big maple in the front yard. Aurora, Minnesota, deep in the great North Woods, riding the jagged edge of the Iron Range, had not yet wakened. This was Cork’s favorite time of day. Although he couldn’t actually see it, he could picture the whole town perfectly. Sunlight dripping down the houses on Gooseberry Lane like butter melting down pancakes. The streets empty and clean. The surface of Iron Lake on such a still morning looking solid as polished steel.

God, he loved this place.

And he’d begun to love again, too, the woman who now stood in the doorway with a gold towel wrapped about her and tucked at her breasts. Her hair was wet. Her pale blue eyes were wide awake and interested. She locked the door behind her.

“We don’t have much time,” she said in a whisper. “I think I heard Stevie stirring.”

“We’re the experts at putting a lot into a little time.”

He smiled wide, and widely he opened his arms.

An explosion kept them from beginning anything. The house shook; the windows rattled; the mourning dove fell silent, frightened to stillness or frightened away.

“My God,” Cork said. “What was that?”

Jo looked at him, her eyes blue and shiny. “I think the earth moved. Without us.” She glanced at the window. “Sonic boom?”

“When was the last time you heard a sonic boom around here?”

From the hallway beyond the bedroom door came the sound of voices, then a knock.

“Jo? Cork?”

“Just a minute, Rose.” She blew Cork a kiss. “Rain check.” She headed to the closet and grabbed a robe from the door hook.

Cork quickly exchanged his silk boxers for a pair of jogging shorts and went to the window. He stared north over the roofs of Aurora where a column of smoke rose thick and black somewhere beyond the town limits. Just above the ground, the air was calm and the smoke climbed straight up four or five hundred feet until it hit a high current that spread it east over Iron Lake. The sky was a milky blue from the haze of the distant forest fires. Against it, the smoke from the nearer burn was dark as crude oil.

At his back, Cork heard the door unlock. Rose stepped in, Stevie at her heels.

“Whatever that was, it didn’t sound good.” Rose tugged her beige chenille robe tight about her broad waist and stuffed her plump, freckled hands into the pockets. She was Jo’s sister and for more than fifteen years had been part of the O’Connor household.

Stevie ran to his father. “Thomething blew up.”

“I think something did, buddy.” Cork put his arm around his son and motioned the others to the window, where they huddled and stared at the huge smoke cloud fanning out above the lake.

The siren on Aurora’s only fire station began to wail, calling the volunteers to duty.

“See the direction that smoke’s coming from?” He glanced at Jo. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

From the concern on her face, it was clear to him that she was. She straightened and turned from the window. “I’d better go.”

“I’ll come with you.” Cork started toward the dresser to get his clothes.

“Cork.” Jo put a hand on his arm to restrain him gently. “I have clients to protect. I need to be out there. But there’s no reason for you to go. You’re not the sheriff anymore.” She seemed reluctant to add that last bit of a reminder, as if she were afraid that even after all this time, it still might hurt him.

He smiled gamely and said, “Then let’s just chalk it up to morbid curiosity.”

Published 2004

When Solemn Winter Moon is accused of murdering a white woman, Cork O’Connor sets out to prove the young Ojibwe’s innocence. This quest quickly becomes a convoluted spiritual journey that leads him on an investigation of a girl twice dead. One of my favorites in the series.

CHARACTERS INTRODUCED

SOLEMN WINTER MOON: A troubled Ojibwe youth, accused of murdering a white girl.

DOROTHY WINTER MOON: Solemn’s long-suffering mother.

FLETCHER KANE: A wealthy physician and father of the murdered girl.

GLORIA KANE: Fletcher’s sister.

FATHER MAL THORNE: A sympathetic priest, too fond of alcohol, and on the edge of losing his faith.

ARNE SODERBERG: The new sheriff of Tamarack County, a man better suited to politics than to law enforcement.

RANDY GOODING: A Tamarack County sheriff’s deputy and staunch Catholic.

AN EXCERPT FROM BLOOD HOLLOW

January, as usual, was meat locker cold, and the girl had already been missing for nearly two days. Corcoran O’Connor couldn’t ignore the first circumstance. The second he tried not to think about.

He stood in snow up to his ass, more than two feet of drifted powder blinding white in the afternoon sun. He lifted his tinted goggles and glanced at the sky, a blue ceiling held up by green walls of pine. He stood on a ridge that overlooked a small oval of ice called Needle Lake, five miles from the nearest maintained road. Aside from the track his snowmobile had pressed into the powder, there was no sign of human life. A rugged vista lay before him—an uplifted ridge, a jagged shoreline, a bare granite pinnacle that jutted from the ice and gave the lake its name—but the recent snowfall had softened the look of the land. In his time, Cork had seen nearly fifty winters come and go. Sometimes the snow fell softly, sometimes it came in a rage. Always it changed the face of whatever it touched. Cork couldn’t help thinking that in this respect, snow was a little like death. Except that death, when it changed a thing, changed it forever.

He took off his mittens, deerskin lined with fleece. He turned back to the Polaris snowmobile that Search and Rescue had provided for him, and he pulled a radio transmitter from the compartment behind the seat. When he spoke through the mouth hole of his ski mask, his words ghosted against the radio in a cloud of white vapor.

“Unit Three to base. Over.”

“This is base. Go ahead, Cork.”

“I’m at Needle Lake. No sign of her. I’m going to head up to Hat Lake. That’ll finish this section.”

“I copy that. Have you seen Bledsoe?”

“That’s a negative.”

“He completed the North Arm trail and was going to swing over to give you a hand. Also, be advised that the National Weather Service has issued a severe weather warning. A blizzard’s coming our way. Sheriff’s thinking of pulling everybody in.”

Cork O’Connor had lived in the Northwoods of Minnesota most of his life. Although at the moment there was only a dark cloud bank building in the western sky, he knew that in no time at all the weather could turn.

“Ten-four, Patsy. I’ll stay in touch. Unit Three out.”

He’d been out since first light, and despite the deerskin mittens, the Sorel boots and thick socks, the quilted snowmobile suit, the down parka, and the ski mask, he was cold to the bone. He put the radio back, lifted a thermos from the compartment under the seat of the Polaris, and poured a cup of coffee. It was only lukewarm, but it felt great going down his throat. As he sipped, he heard the sound of another machine cutting through the pines to his right. In a minute, a snowmobile broke through a gap in the trees, and shot onto the trail where Cork’s own machine sat idle. Oliver Bledsoe buzzed up beside Cork and killed the engine. He dismounted and pulled off his ski mask.

“Heard you on the radio with Patsy,” Bledsoe said. “Knew I’d catch you here.” He cast a longing look at Cork’s coffee. “Got any left?”

“Couple swallows,” Cork said. He poured the last of the coffee into the cup and offered it to Bledsoe. “All yours.”

“Thanks.”

Bledsoe was true-blood Iron Lake Ojibwe. He was large, muscular, a hair past fifty, with a wide, honest face and warm almond eyes. Although he was now an attorney and headed the legal affairs office for the tribal council, in his early years he’d worked as a logger and he knew this area well. Cork was glad to have him there.

Bledsoe stripped off his gloves and wrapped his hands around the warm cup. He closed his eyes to savor the coffee as it coursed down his throat. “Anything?” he asked.

“Nothing,” Cork said.

“Lot of ground to cover.” Bledsoe handed the cup back and glanced north where the wilderness stretched all the way to Canada. “It’s a shame, nice girl like her, something like this.” He dug beneath his parka and brought out a pack of Chesterfields and Zippo lighter. He offered a cigarette to Cork, who declined. He lit up, took a deep breath, and exhaled a great white cloud of smoke and wet breath. He put his gloves back on and let the cigarette dangle from the corner of his mouth. Nodding toward the sky in the west, he said, “You hear what’s coming in? If that girl didn’t have bad luck, she’d have no luck at all.”

Cork heard the squawk of his radio and picked it up.

“Base to all units. It’s official. We’ve got us a blizzard on the doorstep. A real ass kicker, looks like. Come on in. Sheriff says he doesn’t want anyone else lost out there.”

Cork listened as one by one the other units acknowledged.

“Unit Three. Unit Four. Did you copy? Over.”

“This is Unit Three. Bledsoe’s with me. We copy, Patsy. But listen. I still haven’t checked Hat Lake. I’d like to have a quick look before I head back.”

“Negative, Cork. Sheriff says turn around now. He’s pulling in the dogs and air search, too. Weather service says it’s not a storm to mess with.”

“Is Wally there?”

“He won’t tell you anything different.”

“Put him on.”

Cork waited.

“Schanno, here. This better be good.”

Cork could see him, Sheriff Wally Schanno. Grim, harried. With a missing girl, a whale of a blizzard, and a recalcitrant ex-sheriff on his hands.

“I’m just shy of Hat Lake, Wally. I’m going to check it out before I turn back.”

“The hell you are. Have you taken a good look behind you?”

Glancing back to the west, toward the cloud bank that was now looming high above the tree line, Cork knew time was short.

“It would be a shame to come this far and not make it that last mile.”

“Bring yourself in. That’s an order.”

“What are you going to do if I don’t? Fire me? I’m a volunteer.”

“You want to stay on Search and Rescue, you’ll come back now. You read me, Unit Three?”

“Loud and clear, Sheriff.”

“Good. I expect to see you shortly. Base out.”

Schanno sounded weary deep down in his soul. Cork knew that the sheriff would turn away from the radio to face the family of the missing girl, having just reduced significantly the chances of finding her alive. For Cork, being out there in the cold and the snow with a blizzard at his back was infinitely preferable to what Sheriff Wally Schanno had to deal with. Once again, he was exceedingly glad that the badge he himself had once worn was now pinned to the chest of another man.

“Guess that about does it,” Oliver Bledsoe said.

“I’m going to check Hat Lake.”

“You heard the sheriff.”

“I’ve got to know, Ollie.”

Bledsoe nodded. “You want a hand?”

“No. You go on back. I won’t be more than half an hour behind you.”

“Schanno’ll skin you alive.”

“I’ll take my chances with Wally.”

Cork climbed onto the seat, kicked the engine over, and shot east in a roar of sparkling powder.

He hated snowmobiles. Hated the noise, a desecration of the silence of the deep woods that was to him a beauty so profound it felt sacred. Hated the kind of people snowmobiling brought, people who looked at the woods as they would an amusement park, just another diversion in the never-ending battle against boredom. Hated the ease with which the machines allowed access to a wilderness that could swallow the ignorant and unwary without a trace. The only value he could see in a snowmobile was that it allowed him, in a situation like this, to cover a large area quickly.

By the time he reached Hat Lake, the dark wall of cloud behind him stretched north and south from horizon to horizon, completely blotting out the late afternoon sun. The sight gave Cork chills that had nothing to do with the temperature. He found no sign of a snowmobile on the trail that circled the lake. Exactly what he’d suspected, but he wanted to be certain. The wind rose at his back. He watched ghosts of snow swirl up and pirouette across the lake ice. Except for the dancing snow and the trees as they bent to the rising wind, nothing moved. Not one flicker of life across the whole, frigid face of that land.

Published 2005

Back in uniform as the sheriff of Tamarack County, Cork O’Connor is devastated when a sniper’s bullet meant for him fells one of his deputies instead. Bent on tracking down the shooter, he pays little attention as his own wife becomes the target of another man’s attentions. Structurally, this is the most experimental novel in my series, and is the first of a two-book story arc, which is completed in Copper River, the book that follows.

CHARACTERS INTRODUCED

DINA WILLNER: An attractive and dangerous security consultant from Chicago, hired to help solve a murder in Tamarack County.

MARSHA DROSS: The first female deputy sheriff in Tamarack County.

LOUIS JACOBY: A wealthy, connected man from Chicago, whose youngest son is murdered in Tamarack County.

BEN JACOBY: Louis’s elder son, a mysterious figure whose past is intermingled with Cork’s in unpleasant ways.

BYRON ST. ONGE (STONE): A man for whom killing is second nature.

AN EXCERPT FROM MERCY FALLS

She woke naked on the bed, in a room she didn’t recognize, her mind as clear of memory as the sky outside her window was of clouds. A huge pillow that smelled faintly of lavender cradled her head. She was too warm and drew back the covers so that she lay exposed on the white sheet like a delicacy on a china plate.

She tried to sit up, far too quickly, and the room spun. A minute later, she tried again, this time rising gradually until she could see the whole of the great bedroom. The bed itself was a four-poster with a canopy. The armoire a few feet distant was the color of maple syrup and carved with ornate scrolling. On the walls, in elegant, gilt-edged frames, hung oil paintings of Mediterranean scenes, mostly with boats and angry, blue-black seas. The magnificent red of the Persian rug matched the thick drapes drawn back to let in the morning light. None of this was familiar to her. But there was one detail that struck a welcome chord: an explosion of daisies in a yellow vase on the vanity. Daisies, she remembered, had always been her favorite flowers.

A clean, white terry cloth robe had been neatly laid out at the foot of the bed, but she ignored it. She walked to the daisies and touched one of the blossoms. Something about the fragility of the petals touched her in return and made her sad in a way that felt like grieving.

For whom? she wondered, trying to nudge aside the veil that, at the moment, hung between her perception and all her understanding. Then a thought occurred to her. The birds. Maybe that was it. She was grieving for all the dead birds.

Her eyes lifted to the vanity mirror. In the reflection there, she saw the bruises on her body. One on her left breast above her nipple, another on the inside of her right thigh, oval-shaped, both of them, looking very much like the blue ghosts of tooth marks.

As she reached down and gingerly touched the tender skin, she heard firecrackers go off outside her window, two of them. Only two? she thought. What kind of celebration was that?

She put on the robe, went to the door, and opened it. Stepping out, she found herself in a long hallway with closed doors on either side, her only companions several tall standing plants that were spaced between the rooms like mute guardians. At each end of the hall, leaded windows with beveled glass let in enough daylight to give the emptiness a sense of benign well-being that she somehow knew was false. She crept down the hallway, listening for the slightest sound, feeling the deep nap of the carpet crush under the soles of her bare feet. At last she reached a staircase that wound to the lower level. She followed the lazy spiral unsteadily, her hand holding to the railing for balance, leaving moist fingerprints on the polished wood that vanished a moment after her passing.

She stood at the bottom of the stairway, uncertain which way to turn. To her right, a large room with a baby grand piano at its center, a brick fireplace, a sofa and loveseat of chocolate brown leather. To her left, a dining room with a huge crystal chandelier and a table large enough for a banquet. Sunlight from a long window cleaved the table, and in the bright gleam sat another vase full of daisies. Drawn by the smell of freshly brewed coffee, she moved through the dining room to the opened door of the kitchen beyond.

A carafe of orange juice sat on the counter near the sink, and next to it a glass, poured and waiting. The smell of the coffee came from a French-press coffeemaker that sat on a large butcher-block island. An empty cup and saucer had been placed on the block, as if she were expected. A book lay there, too, opened to a page that began, I couldn’t sleep all night; a fog-horn was groaning incessantly in the Sound, and I tossed half-sick between grotesque reality and savage, frightening dreams.

The sliding glass door that overlooked the veranda was drawn back, letting in the morning air, and she walked across the cool black and white kitchen tiles to the doorway. From there, she could see the back of the estate with its pool set into the lawn like a piece of cut turquoise. Beyond was the blue-gray sweep of a great body of water that collided at the horizon with a cornflower sky. Beside the pool stood a man in a yellow windbreaker with the hood pulled up. Although she couldn’t see his face, there was something familiar in his stance. She stepped outside, not bothering to slide the door closed behind her.

It was a chilly morning. The cold marble of the veranda made her feet ache, but she paid no attention, because something else had caught her eye. A crimson billow staining the blue water. She descended the steps and followed a limestone walk to the apron of the pool.

The body lay on the bottom, except for the arms, which floated free, lifted slightly as if in supplication. The swimming trunks were white, the skin tanned. She couldn’t see the wounds, only the blood that leaked from somewhere underneath, gradually tinting the turquoise water a deep rose.

The standing man turned his head slowly, as if it were difficult, painful even, for him to look away from death. The sun was at his back, his face shadowed, a gun in his hand.

She recognized him, and the thought of what he’d just done pulled her heart out of her chest.

“Oh, Cork, no,” she whispered.

When he heard his name, his hard, dark eyes grew soft. Corcoran O’Connor stared at his wife, at her clean robe, her bare feet, her hair still mussed from a night she barely remembered.

“Jo,” he said, “I came to bring you home.”

Published 2006

The novel that completes the story begun in Mercy Falls. Wounded and hiding out in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, Cork O’Connor must evade the hired killers still on his trail while trying to solve the mystery of a murdered adolescent runaway. I consider this the first novel in which I set out to explore deeply a social issue important to me—the question of what happens to the children we close our doors against, who become homeless and, eventually, the targets of the worst kinds of predators.

CHARACTERS INTRODUCED

JEWELL DUBOIS: Cork O’Connor’s cousin, a veterinarian and widow living with her son in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

REN DUBOIS: Jewell’s fourteen-year-old son.

CHARLENE (CHARLIE) MILLER: A tomboy who leads a troubled life and is Ren’s best friend.

NED HODDER: Constable of Bodine, Michigan, a man who writes poetry and guards well the dark secrets of his little town.

AN EXCERPT FROM COPPER RIVER

Henry Meloux, the old Ojibwe Mide, might tell the story this way.

He might begin by saying that the earth is alive, that all things on it—water, air, plants, rocks, even dead trees—have spirit. In the absence of wind, the grass still trembles. On days when the clouds are dense as gray wool, flowers still understand how to track the sun. Trees, when they bend, whisper to one another. In such a community of spirits, nothing goes unnoticed. Would not the forest, therefore, know that a child is about to die?

She is fourteen years, nine months, twenty-seven days old. She has never had a period, never had a boyfriend, never even had a real date. She has never eaten in a restaurant more formal than McDonald’s. She has never seen a city larger than Marquette, Michigan.

She cannot remember a night when she wasn’t awakened by nightmares, some dreamed, many horribly real. She cannot remember a day she was happy, although she has always been hopeful that she might find happiness, discover it like a diamond in the dust at her feet. Through all the horror of her life, she has, miraculously, held to that someone waits for her and worries, a place she has never been.

Until now.

Now, though she is only fourteen, she is about to die. And she knows it.

Somewhere among the trees below her, the man she calls Scorpio is coming for her.

She cringes behind a pile of brush in the middle of a clear-cut hillside studded with stumps like gravestones. The morning sun has just climbed above the tops of the poplar trees that outline the clearing. The chill bite of autumn is in the air. From where she crouches high on the hill, she can see the gleam of Lake Superior miles to the north. The great inland sea beckons, and she imagines sailing away on all that empty blue, alone on a boat taking her toward a place where someone waits for her and worries, a place she has never been.

She shivers violently. Before fleeing, she grabbed a thin brown blanket, which she wrapped around her shoulders. Her feet are bare, gone numb in the long, cold night. They bleed, wounded during her flight through the woods, but she no longer feels any pain. They’ve become stones at the end of her ankles.

In the trees far below, a dog barks, cracking the morning calm. The girl focuses on a place two hundred yards distant where, half an hour earlier, she’d emerged from the forest and started to climb the logged-over hillside. An hour after dawn, Scorpio’s dog had begun baying. When she heard the hungry sound, she knew he’d got hold of her scent. What little hope she’d held to melted instantly. After that, it was a frantic run trying to stay ahead.

Scorpio steps from the shadow of the trees. He’s like a whip, thin and cruel and electric in the sunlight. She can see the glint off the blue barrel of the rifle he cradles. Snatch, his black-and-tan German shepherd, pads before him, nose to the earth, tracking her through the graveyard of stumps. Scorpio scans the hillside above. She thinks she can see him smile, a gash of white.

There is no sense in hiding now. In a few minutes, Scorpio will be on her. Grasshopper quick, she pops from the blind of brush and sprints toward the hilltop. Her senseless feet thud against the hard earth. She lets the blanket fall to the ground, leaves it behind her. Starved for sunlight, the skin of her face and arms looks bleached. Beneath her thin, dirty T-shirt her breasts are barely formed, but the small, fleshy mounds rise and fall dramatically as she sucks air in desperate gasps. Behind her, the dog begins a furious barking. He has seen the prey.

She crests the hill and comes to a dead end. Before her the ground falls away, a sheer drop two hundred feet to a river that’s a rush of white water between jagged rocks. There is no place left to run. She casts a frenzied eye back. Scorpio lopes toward her with Snatch in the lead. To her left and right, there is only the ragged lip of the cut across the hill.

Only one way for her to go now: down.

The face of the cliff below is a rugged profile offering handholds and small ledges. There are also tufts of brush that cling tenaciously to the stone, rooted in tiny fissures. She spies a shelf ten feet below, barely wider than her foot, but it is enough. She kneels and lowers herself over the edge. Clinging to the brush and the rough knobs of stone that punctuate the cliff, she begins her descent.

The rock scrapes her skin, leaves her arms bleeding. Her toes stretch for a foothold but, numbed, feel almost nothing. Weakened by an ordeal that has gone on longer than she can remember, her strength threatens to fail her, but she does not give up. She has never given up. Whatever the horror in front of her, she has always faced it and pushed ahead. This moment is no different. She wills a place to stand. Her feet find support, a few inches of flat rock on which she eases herself down.

“Come on, sweet thing. Come on back up.”

Scorpio’s voice is reasonable, almost comforting. She lifts her face. He’s smiling, bone-white teeth between thin, bloodless lips. Beside him, the dog snarls and snaps, foam dripping from his purple gums.

“Hush!” Scorpio orders. “Sit.”

Snatch obeys.

“Come on, now. Time to end this foolishness.”

He lays down his rifle, bends low, and offers his hand.

In the quiet while she considers, she presses herself to the cliff where the stone still holds the cold of night. She can hear far below the hiss and roiling of the white water.

“We’ll go back to the cabin,” Scorpio says. “Have a little breakfast. Bet you’re hungry. Now, doesn’t that sound better than running over these woods, ruining those pretty little feet, freezing your ass off?”

He bends lower. His outstretched hand pushes nearer, a hand that has offered only humiliation and pain. On his wrist is a tattoo, a large black scorpion, the reason for the name she has given him in her thinking. She eyes his hairy knuckles, then looks into his face, which at the moment appears deceptively human.

“Think about it. You find a place to perch on that cliff, then what? It’s not so bad out here right now. Sun’s up, air’s calm. But tonight it’ll be close to freezing. That means you, too. You want to freeze to death? Hell, it doesn’t matter anyway. I’ll just leave old Snatch here to make sure you don’t climb back up, go get me some rope, and come down there to get you. But I guarantee if I have to do that, I won’t be in a forgiving mood. So what do you say?”

Not taking her eyes off him, she seeks a foothold farther down, somewhere out of his reach, but she cannot feel her toes. Finally, she risks a glance below her. In that instant, Scorpio’s hand locks around her wrist.

“Got you.”

He’s strong, his grip powerful. He drags her kicking up the face of the rock. She struggles, screams as he wraps his arms around her. The dog dances back from the edge, barking crazily. Scorpio’s breath smells of tobacco and coffee, but there’s another smell coming off him, familiar and revolting. The musk odor of his sex.

“Oh, little darling,” he croons, “am I going to make you pay.”

She puts all her desperation, all her remaining strength, into one last effort, a violent twist that breaks her loose, sends her tumbling backward over the cliff.

The world spins. First there is blue sky, then white water, then blue sky again. She closes her eyes and spreads her arms. Suddenly she isn’t falling but flying. The wind streams across her skin. Her held breath fills her like a smooth balloon. She is weightless.

For one glorious moment in her short, unhappy life, she is absolutely free.

•   •   •

Meloux would finish gently, pointing out, perhaps, that the fall of the smallest robin is known to the spirits of the earth, that no death goes unnoticed or unmourned, that the river has simply been waiting, and like a mother she has opened wide her arms.

Published 2007

At Henry Meloux’s request, Cork O’Connor embarks on a search for the son the old man has never seen. The immediate result is an attempt on Henry’s life. As Cork and the ancient Mide continue the search, the story of Henry’s remarkable life is revealed. This is a novel about the sacrifices we make in the name of love and is my absolute favorite in the series.

CHARACTERS INTRODUCED

SEAN PFLUGLEMAN: Jenny O’Connor’s boyfriend, a college student and aspiring poet.

TRIXIE POLLARD: A woman in her sixties, a former investigator for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who likes her Canadian ale.

HENRY (HANK) WELLINGTON: Henry Meloux’s incredibly wealthy and very reclusive long-lost son.

AN EXCERPT FROM THUNDER BAY

The promise, as I remember it, happened this way.

A warm August morning, early. Wally Schanno’s already waiting at the landing. His truck’s parked in the lot, his boat’s in the water. He’s drinking coffee from a red thermos big as a fireplug.

Iron Lake is glass. East, it mirrors the peach-colored dawn. West, it still reflects the hard bruise of night. Tall pines, dark in the early morning light, make a black ragged frame around the water.

The dock’s old, weathered, the wood gone fuzzy, flaking gray. The boards sag under my weight, groan a little.

“Coffee?” Schanno offers.

I shake my head, toss my gear into his boat. “Let’s fish.”

We’re far north of Aurora, Minnesota. Among the trees on the shoreline, an occasional light glimmers from one of the cabins hidden there. Schanno motors slowly toward a spot off a rocky point where the bottom falls away quickly. Cuts the engine. Sorts through his tackle box. Pulls out a pearl white minnow flash, a decent clear-water lure for walleye. Clips it on his line. Casts.

Me, I choose a smoky Twister Tail and add a little fish scent. Half a minute after Schanno’s, my lure hits the water.

August isn’t the best time to fish. For one thing, the bugs are awful. Also, the water near the surface is often too warm. The big fish—walleye and bass—dive deep, seeking cooler currents. Unless you use sonar, they can be impossible to locate. There are shallows near a half-submerged log off to the north where something smaller—perch or crappies—might be feeding. But I’ve already guessed that fishing isn’t what’s on Schanno’s mind.

The afternoon before, he’d come to Sam’s Place, the burger joint I own on Iron Lake. He’d leaned in the window and asked for a chocolate shake. I couldn’t remember the last time Schanno had actually ordered something from me. He stood with the big Sweetheart cup in his hand, not sipping from the straw, not saying anything, but not leaving either. His wife, Arletta, had died a few months before. A victim of Alzheimer’s, she’d succumbed to a massive stroke. She’d been a fine woman, a teacher. Both my daughters, Jenny and Anne, had passed through her third-grade classroom years before. Loved her. Everybody did. Schanno’s children had moved far away, to Bethesda, Maryland, and Seattle, Washington. Arletta’s death left Wally alone in the house he’d shared with her for over forty years. He’d begun to hang around Johnny’s Pinewood Broiler for hours, drinking coffee, talking with the regulars, other men who’d lost wives, jobs, direction. He walked the streets of town and stood staring a long time at window displays. He was well into his sixties, a big man—shoes specially made from the Red Wing factory—with a strong build, hands like an orangutan. A couple of years earlier, because of Arletta’s illness, he’d retired as sheriff of Tamarack County, which was a job I’d held twice myself. Some men, idle time suits them. Others, it’s a death sentence. Wally Schanno looked like a man condemned.

When he suggested we go fishing in the morning, I’d said sure.

Now we’re alone on the lake—me, Schanno, and a couple of loons fifty yards to our right diving for breakfast. The sun creeps above the trees. Suddenly everything has color. We breathe in the scent of evergreen and clean water and the faint fish odor coming from the bottom of Schanno’s boat. Half an hour and we haven’t said a word. The only sounds are the sizzle of line as we cast, the plop of the lures hitting water, and the occasional cry of the loons.

I’m happy to be there on that August morning. Happy to be fishing, although I hold no hope of catching anything. Happy to be sharing the boat and the moment with a man like Schanno.

“Heard you got yourself a PI license,” Schanno says.

I wind my reel smoothly, jerking the rod back occasionally to make the lure dart in the water like a little fish. There aren’t any walleyes to fool, but it’s what you do when you’re fishing.

“Yep,” I reply.

“Gonna hang out a shingle or something?”

The line as I draw it in leaves the smallest of wakes on the glassy surface, dark wrinkles crawling across the reflected sky. “I haven’t decided.”

“Figure there’s enough business to support a PI here?”

He asks this without looking at me, pretending to watch his line.

“Guess I’ll find out,” I tell him.

“Not happy running Sam’s Place?”

“I like it fine. But I’m closed all winter. Need something to keep me occupied and out of mischief.”

“What’s Jo think?” Talking about my wife.

“So long as I don’t put on a badge again, she’s happy.”

Schanno says, “I feel like I’m dying, Cork.”

“Are you sick?”

“No, no.” He’s quick to wave off my concern. “I’m bored. Bored to death. I’m too old for law enforcement, too young for a rocking chair.”

“They’re always hiring security at the casino.”

Shakes his head. “Sit-on-your-ass kind of job. Not for me.”

“What exactly are you asking, Wally?”

“Just that if something, you know, comes your way that you need help with, something you can’t handle on your own, well, maybe you’ll think about giving me a call.”

“You don’t have a license.”

“I could get one. Or just make me a consultant. Hell, I’ll do it for free.”

The sun’s shooting fire at us across the water. Another boat has appeared half a mile south. The loons take off, flapping north.

“Tell you what, Wally. Anything comes my way I think you could help me with, I promise I’ll let you know.”

He looks satisfied. In fact, he looks damn happy.

We both change lures and make a dozen more casts without a bite. Another boat appears.

“The lake’s getting crowded,” I say. “How ’bout we call it and have some breakfast at the Broiler.”

“On me,” Schanno offers, beaming.

We reel in our lines. Head back toward the landing. Feeling pretty good.

Nights when I cannot sleep and the demons of my past come to torment me, the promise I made to Wally Schanno that fine August morning is always among them.

Published 2008

The murder of the leader of a Native gang pulls Cork into a battle between Ojibwe warriors, young and old, and outside forces bent on establishing a drug trade on the Iron Lake Reservation. For me, this is a rumination on why violence continues in our own culture and in so many others.

CHARACTERS INTRODUCED

WILL KINGBIRD: A retired military man of Ojibwe heritage, who, before he resettled in Aurora, Minnesota, thought he was through with war forever.

LUCINDA KINGBIRD: Latina wife of Will Kingbird, a woman with a great, embracing heart.

ULY KINGBIRD: Teenage son of Will and Lucinda Kingbird, a youth terribly confused as he confronts his looming manhood.

BUCK REINHARDT: A tree-cutting contractor and one very bitter, very dangerous man.

ELISE REINHARDT: Buck Reinhardt’s disillusioned, alcohol-swilling second wife.

TOM BLESSING: A member of an Ojibwe gang called the Red Boyz.

AN EXCERPT FROM RED KNIFE

The words on the note folded around the check in his wallet read: Here’s $500. A retainer. I need your help. See me today. The note and the money were from Alexander Kingbird, although it was signed Kakaik, which was the name of an Ojibwe war chief. It meant Hawk.

Five hundred dollars was a pretty sound enticement, but Cork O’Connor would have gone for nothing, just to satisfy his curiosity. Although the note didn’t mention Kingbird’s situation, it was easy to read between the lines. In Tamarack County, unless you were stupid or dead you knew that Alexander Kingbird and the Red Boyz were in trouble. How exactly, Cork wondered, did Kingbird think he could help?

Kingbird and his wife, Rayette, lived on the Iron Lake Reservation. Their home was a nice prefab, constructed to look like a log cabin and set back a hundred yards off the road, behind a stand of red pines. A narrow gravel lane cut straight through the trees to the house. As Cork drove up, his headlights swung across a shiny black Silverado parked in front. He knew it belonged to Tom Blessing, Kingbird’s second-in-command. It was Blessing who’d delivered the note that afternoon.

And it was Blessing who opened the door when Cork knocked.

“About time,” Blessing said.

He wasn’t much more than a kid, twenty-one, maybe twenty-two. Long black hair falling freely down his back. Tall, lean, tense. He reminded Cork of a sapling that in the old days might have been used for a rabbit snare: delicately balanced, ready to snap.

“The note said today. It’s still today, Tom,” Cork said.

“My name’s Waubishash.”

Each of the Red Boyz, on joining the gang, took the name of an Ojibwe war chief.

“Let him in.” The order was delivered from behind Blessing, from inside the house.

Blessing stepped back and Cork walked in.

Alexander Kingbird stood on the far side of his living room. “Thank you for coming.”

He was twenty-five, by most standards still a young man, but his eyes weren’t young at all. They were as brown as rich earth and, like earth, they were old. He wore his hair in two long braids tied at the end with strips of rawhide, each hung with an owl feather. A white scar ran from the corner of his right eye to the lobe of his ear. Cork had heard it happened in a knife fight while he was a guest of the California penal system.

Kingbird glanced at Blessing. “You can go.”

Blessing shook his head. “Until this is over, you shouldn’t be alone.”

“Are you planning to shoot me, Mr. O’Connor?”

“I hadn’t thought of it, but I may be the only guy in this county who hasn’t.”

Kingbird smiled. “I’ll be fine, Waubishash. Go on.”

Blessing hesitated. Maybe he was working on an argument; if so, he couldn’t quite put it together. He finally nodded, turned, and left. A minute later, Cork heard the Silverado’s big engine turn over, followed by the sound of the tires on gravel. Everything got quiet then, except for a baby cooing in a back room and the low, loving murmur of a woman in response.

“Mind taking your shoes off?” Kingbird said. “New carpet and Rayette’s kind of particular about keeping it clean.”

“No problem.” Cork slipped his Salomons off and set them beside a pair of Red Wing boots and a pair of women’s Skechers, which were on a mat next to the door.

“Sit down,” Kingbird said.

Cork took a comfortable-looking easy chair upholstered in dark green. Kingbird sat on the sofa.

“You know why you’re here?” he said to Cork.

“Instead of twenty questions, why don’t you just tell me.”

“Buck Reinhardt wants me dead.”

“You blame him?”

“I’m not responsible for his daughter dying.”

“No, but you’re hiding the man who is.”

“And you know this how?”

“Popular speculation. And he’s one of the Red Boyz.”

“I want to talk to Reinhardt.”

“Why?”

Kingbird sat tall. He wore a green T-shirt, military issue it looked like. On his forearm was a tattoo. A bulldog—the Marine Corps devil dog—with USMC below.

“I have a daughter of my own,” he said. His eyes moved a hair to the right, in the direction from which the cooing had come. “I understand how he feels.”

“I don’t think you do. Your daughter is still alive.”

“My daughter will also never use drugs.”

“In that, I wish you luck.”

“Reinhardt and some of his men threatened one of my Red Boyz yesterday. He needs to understand that anything he does—to me or any of the Red Boyz—will be answered in kind. I’ve seen wars, O’Connor. It’s easier to stop them before they get started.”

“Then give him what he wants. Give him the man responsible for his daughter’s death. Give him Lonnie Thunder.”

The suggestion seemed to have no effect on Kingbird. “Will you arrange a meeting?”

“Why me?”

“Because you’re not just another white man. You’ve got some Ojibwe blood in your veins. Also, you used to be sheriff around here and I figure that gives you a certain standing. And—” he held up a card, one of the business cards Cork routinely tacked to bulletin boards around Aurora “—it’s how you earn your living.”

“How do I know, and how can Buck be sure, that you won’t just shoot him as soon as he shows up?”

“Let him name the place and the time. You’ll be there to observe and to maintain the peace.”

“Five hundred dollars isn’t nearly enough to get me to step between blazing guns.”

“I’ll be unarmed. You make sure Reinhardt is, too. And the five hundred dollars is a retainer. When this meeting is done, you’ll have another five hundred.”

Rayette Kingbird strolled into the room carrying her child. Misty had been born six months earlier. When Alexander Kingbird looked at his wife and his daughter, his face softened.

Cork stood up. “Evening, Rayette.”

“Cork.”

“Bedtime for Misty?”

She smiled. She was full-blood Ojibwe. Her life before Kingbird had been hard. Abandoned by her mother and raised by her grandparents, she’d been into every kind of trouble imaginable. When Cork was sheriff of Tamarack County, he’d picked her up a few times, juvenile offenses. She’d skipped childhood through no fault of her own and he’d thought that any youth she might have had had been squeezed out long ago. Then she met Kingbird and married him and things changed. She looked young and she looked happy.

“Past bedtime,” she said. “She wants a kiss from her daddy.”

Rayette held the baby out and Kingbird took his daughter. He nuzzled her neck. She gurgled. He kissed her forehead. She squirmed. “Night, little turtle,” he said. He handed her back to his wife.

Rayette left with the child. Kingbird looked after them a moment, then turned to Cork.

“We’ve named her Misty, but her real name is Tomorrow. Every child’s name is Tomorrow. You, me, Buck Reinhardt, we’re Yesterday. Kristi Reinhardt shouldn’t have died. No child’s life should be cut short of tomorrow.”

“Nice sentiment, Alex, but what are you going to offer Buck? What do I tell him that will make him agree to meet you?”

He ignored the fact that Cork had used his given name, not the one he’d taken as a member of the Red Boyz. He said, “Tell him he will have justice. Tell him I give my word.”

Published 2009

A week before Thanksgiving, Cork’s wife, Jo, is among those on a charter flight that disappears in the Rocky Mountains of Wyoming during a terrible snowstorm. Cork joins the official search and races to locate the downed plane before the bitter winter cold can take its toll. Although he doesn’t realize it, some involved in the search are willing to kill to be certain the aircraft and those aboard it are never found.

CHARACTERS INTRODUCED

HUGH PARMER: A wealthy Texas businessman whose heart is as big as his bank account.

JON RUDE: A Wyoming rancher, part-time helicopter pilot, full-time family man.

DIANE RUDE: Wife of Jon Rude, of Italian descent, and one great cook.

ANNA RUDE: Young, precocious daughter of Jon and Diane Rude.

DEWEY QUINN: Owl Creek County, Wyoming, deputy sheriff.

LAME DEER NIGHTWIND: A Wyoming Arapaho, pilot for hire who’ll take just about any job without question so long as it pays enough.

BECCA BODINE: Wife of the missing pilot, Sandy Bodine, who believes powerfully in the integrity of her husband.

LIZ BURNS: Attorney representing the Bodine family, for whom justice isn’t always what’s found in a law book.

AN EXCERPT FROM HEAVEN’S KEEP

In the weeks after the tragedy, as he accumulates pieces of information, he continues to replay that morning in his mind. More times than he can count, more ways than he can remember, he juggles the elements. He imagines details. Changes details. Struggles desperately to alter the outcome. It never works. The end is always the same, so abysmally far beyond his control. Usually it goes something like this:

She waits alone outside the hotel in the early gray of a cloudy dawn. Her suitcase is beside her. In her hand is a disposable cup half-filled with bad coffee. A tumbleweed rolls across the parking lot, pushed by a cold November wind coming off the High Plains.

This is one of the details that changes. Sometimes he imagines an empty plastic bag or a loose page of newspaper drifting across the asphalt. They’re all clichés, but that’s how he sees it.

She stares down the hill toward Casper, Wyoming, a dismal little city spread across the base of a dark mountain like debris swept up by the wind and dumped there. As she watches, a tongue of dirty-looking cloud descends from the overcast to lick the stone face of the mountain.

She thinks, I should have called him. She thinks, I should have told him I’m sorry.

She sips from her hotel coffee, wishing, as she sometimes does when she’s stressed or troubled, that she still smoked.

George LeDuc pushes out through the hotel door. He’s wearing a jean jacket with sheepskin lining that he bought in a store in downtown Casper the day before. “Makes me look like a cowboy,” he’d said with an ironic grin. LeDuc is full-blood Ojibwe. He’s seventy, with long white hair. He rolls his suitcase to where she stands and parks it beside hers.

“You look like you didn’t sleep too good,” he says. “Did you call him?”

She stares at the bleak city, the black mountain, the gray sky. “No.”

“Call him, Jo. It’ll save you both a whole lot of heartache.”

“He’s gone by now.”

“Leave him a message. You’ll feel better.”

“He could have called me,” she points out.

“Could have. Didn’t. Mexican standoff. Is it making you happy?” He rests those warm brown Anishinaabe eyes on her. “Call Cork,” he says.

Behind them the others stumble out the hotel doorway, four men looking sleepy, appraising the low gray sky with concern. One of them is being led by another, as if blind.

“Still no glasses?” LeDuc asks.

“Can’t find the bastards anywhere,” Edgar Little Bear replies. “Ellyn says she’ll send me a pair in Seattle.” The gray-haired man lifts his head and sniffs the air. “Smells like snow.”

“Weather Channel claims a storm’s moving in,” Oliver Washington, who’s guiding Little Bear, offers.

LeDuc nods. “I heard that, too. I talked to the pilot. He says no problem.”

“Hope you trust this guy,” Little Bear says.

“He told me yesterday he could fly through the crack in the Statue of Liberty’s ass.”

Little Bear’s eyes swim, unfocused as he looks toward LeDuc. “Lady Liberty’s wearing a dress, George.”

“You ever hear of hyperbole, Edgar?” LeDuc turns back to Jo and says in a low voice, “Call him.”

“The airport van will be here any minute.”

“We’ll wait.”

She puts enough distance between herself and the others for privacy, draws her cell phone from her purse, and turns it on. When it’s powered up, she punches in the number of her home telephone. No one answers. Voice mail kicks in, and she leaves this: “Cork, it’s me.” There’s a long pause as she considers what to say next. Finally: “I’ll call you later.”

In his imagining, this is a detail that never changes. It’s one of the few elements of the whole tragic incident that’s set in stone. Her recorded voice, the empty silence of her long hesitation.

“Any luck?” LeDuc asks when she rejoins the others.

She shakes her head. “He didn’t answer. I’ll try again in Seattle.”

The van pulls into the lot and stops in front of the hotel. The small gathering of passengers lift their luggage and clamber aboard. They all help Little Bear, for whom everything is a blur.

“Heard snow’s moving in,” Oliver Washington tells the driver.

“Yep. Real ass kicker they’re saying. You folks’re getting out just in time.” The driver swings the van door closed and pulls away.

It’s no more than ten minutes to the airport where the charter plane is waiting. The pilot helps them aboard and gets them seated.

“Bad weather coming in, we heard,” Scott No Day tells him.

The pilot’s wearing a white shirt with gold and black epaulets, a black cap with gold braid across the crown. “A storm front’s moving into the Rockies. There’s a break west of Cody. We ought to be able to fly through before she closes.”

Except for Jo, all those aboard have a tribal affiliation. No Day is Eastern Shoshone. Little Bear is Northern Arapaho. Oliver Washington and Bob Tall Grass are both Cheyenne. The pilot, like LeDuc, is Ojibwe, a member of the Lac Courte Oreilles band out of Wisconsin.

The pilot gives them the same preflight speech he delivered to Jo and LeDuc the day before at the regional airport outside Aurora. It’s rote, but he throws in a few funny lines that get his passengers smiling and comfortable. Then he turns and takes his seat at the controls up front.

They taxi, lift off, and almost immediately plow into clouds thick as mud. The windows streak with moisture. The plane shivers, and the metal seems to twist in the grip of the powerful air currents. They rattle upward at a steep angle for a few minutes, then suddenly they’ve broken into blue sky with the morning sun at their backs and below them a mattress of white cloud. Like magic, the ride smoothes out.

Her thinking goes back to Aurora, to her husband. They’ve always had a rule: Never go to bed mad. There should be a corollary, she thinks: Never separate for a long trip with anger still between you.

In the seat opposite, Edgar Little Bear, not a young man, closes his purblind eyes and lays his head back to rest. Next to him, No Day, slender and with a fondness for turquoise and silver, opens a dog-eared paperback and begins to read. In the seats directly ahead of Jo and LeDuc, Washington and Tall Grass continue a discussion begun the night before, comparing the merits of the casinos on the Vegas strip to those on Fremont Street. Jo pulls a folder from the briefcase at her feet and opens it on her lap.

LeDuc says, “Hell, if we’re not prepared now, we never will be.”

“It helps me relax,” she tells him.

He smiles. “Whatever.” And like his old contemporary Edgar Little Bear, he lays his head back and closes his eyes.

They’re all part of a committee tasked with drafting recommendations for oversight of Indian gaming casinos, recommendations they’re scheduled to present at the annual conference of the National Congress of American Indians. Her mind isn’t at all on the documents in her hands. She keeps returning to the argument the day before, to her final exchange with Cork just before she boarded the flight.

“Look, I promise I won’t make any decisions until you’re home and we can talk,” he’d said.

“Not true,” she’d replied. “Your mind’s already made up.”

“Oh? You can read my mind now?”

She’d used the blue needles of her eyes to respond.

“For Christ sake, Jo, I haven’t even talked to Marsha yet.”

“That doesn’t mean you don’t know what you want.”

“Well, I sure as hell know what you want.”

“And it doesn’t matter to you in the least, does it?”

“It’s my life, Jo.”

“Our life, Cork.”

She’d turned, grabbed the handle of her suitcase, and rolled it away without even a good-bye.

She’s always said good-bye, always with a kiss. But not this time. And the moment of that heated separation haunts her. It would have been so easy, she thinks now, to turn back. To say “I’m sorry. I love you. Good-bye.” To leave without the barbed wire of their anger between them.

They’ve been in the air forty-five minutes when the first sign of trouble comes. The plane jolts as if struck by a huge fist. LeDuc, who’s been sleeping, comes instantly awake. Washington and Tall Grass, who’ve been talking constantly, stop in midsentence. They all wait.

From up front, the pilot calls back to them in an easy voice, “Air pocket. Nothing to worry about.”

They relax. The men return to their conversation. LeDuc closes his eyes. Jo focuses on the presentation she’s put together for Seattle.

With the next jolt a few minutes later, the sound of the engines changes and the plane begins to descend, losing altitude rapidly. Very quickly they plunge into the dense cloud cover below.

“Hey!” No Day shouts toward the pilot. “What the hell’s going on?”

“Fasten your seat belts!” the pilot calls over his shoulder. He grips the radio mic with his right hand. “Salt Lake, this is King Air N7723X. We have a problem. I’m descending out of eighteen thousand feet.”

The folder that was on Jo’s lap has been thrown to the floor, the pages of her careful presentation scattered. She grips the arms of her seat and stares out at the gray clouds screaming past. The plane rattles and thumps, and she’s afraid the seams of rivets will pop.

“Goddamn!” No Day cries out. “Shit!”

LeDuc’s hand covers her own. She looks into his brown eyes. The left wing dips precariously, and the plane begins to roll. As they start an irrevocable slide toward earth, they both know the outcome. With this knowledge, a sense of peaceful acceptance descends, and they hold hands, these old friends.

Her greatest regret as she accepts the inevitable—Cork imagines this, because it is his greatest regret as well—is that they didn’t say to each other, “I’m sorry.” Didn’t say, “I love you.” Didn’t say good-bye.

Published 2010

When the bodies of several murdered women are discovered in an abandoned mine shaft, longtime residents of Tamarack County recall the Vanishings, a series of unsolved disappearances dating back to the time when Cork O’Connor’s father was sheriff. The revelation that one of the women was killed by a bullet from his father’s gun sends Cork on a quest for truths buried more than forty years before.

CHARACTERS INTRODUCED

RAINY BISONETTE: Great-niece of Henry Meloux, a woman in midlife, searching for a new path.

MAX CAVANAUGH: Owner of the Vermilion One Mine, a man who understands the responsibility of great power and the danger that comes with it.

LOU HADDAD: Mine engineer and an old friend of Cork O’Connor.

GENIE KUFUS: Department of Energy mine inspector, a woman of science but with appetites of the flesh.

HATTIE STILLDAY: An irascible Ojibwe artist.

OPHELIA STILLDAY: Talented, confused granddaughter of Hattie Stillday.

AN EXCERPT FROM VERMILION DRIFT

That early June day began with one of the worst wounds Cork O’Connor had ever seen. It was nearly three miles long, a mile wide, and more than five hundred feet deep. It bled iron.

From behind the window glass of the fourth-floor conference room in the Great North Mining Company’s office complex, Cork looked down at the Ladyslipper Mine, one of the largest open-pit iron ore excavations in the world. It was a landscape of devastation, of wide plateaus and steep terraces and broad canyons, all of it the color of coagulating blood. He watched as far below him the jaws of an electric power shovel gobbled eighty tons of rock and spit the rubble into a dump truck the size of a house and with wheels twice as tall as a man. The gargantuan machine crawled away up an incline that cut along the side of the pit, and immediately another just like it took its place, waiting to be filled. The work reminded him of insects feeding on the cavity of a dead body.

At the distant end of the mine, poised at the very lip of the pit itself, stood the town of Granger. The new town of Granger. Thirty years earlier, Great North had moved the entire community, buildings and all, a mile south in order to take the ore from beneath the original town site. Just outside Granger stood the immense structures of the taconite plant, where the rock was crushed and processed into iron pellets for shipping. Clouds of steam billowed upward hundreds of feet, huge white pillars holding up the gray overcast of the sky.

Although he’d viewed the mine and the work that went on deep inside many times, the sight never ceased to amaze and sadden him. The Ojibwe part of his thinking couldn’t help but look on the enterprise as a great injury delivered to Grandmother Earth.

“Cork. Good. You’re here.”

Cork turned as Max Cavanaugh closed the door. Cavanaugh was tall and agreeable, a man who easily caught a lady’s eye. In his early forties, he was younger than Cork by a decade. He was almost the last of the Cavanaughs, a family whose name had been associated with mining since 1887, when Richard Frankton Cavanaugh, a railroad man from St. Paul, had founded the Great North Mining Company and had sunk one of the first shafts in Minnesota’s great Iron Range. Cork saw Max Cavanaugh at Mass every Sunday, and in winter they both played basketball for St. Agnes Catholic Church—the team was officially called the St. Agnes Saints, but all the players referred to themselves as “the old martyrs”—so they knew each other pretty well. Cavanaugh was normally a guy with an easy smile, but not today. Today his face was troubled, and with good reason. One of his holdings, the Vermilion One Mine, was at the center of a controversy that threatened at any moment to break into violence.

The two men shook hands.

“Where are the others?” Cork asked.

“They’re already headed to Vermilion One. I wanted to talk to you alone first. Have a seat?”

Cork took a chair at the conference table, and Cavanaugh took another.

“Do you find missing people, Cork?”

The question caught him by surprise. Cork had been expecting some discussion about Vermilion One. But it was also a question with some sting to it, because the most important missing person case he’d ever handled had been the disappearance of his own wife, and that had ended tragically.

“On occasion I’ve been hired to do just that,” he replied cautiously.

“Can you find someone for me?”

“I could try. Who is it?”

The window at Cavanaugh’s back framed his face, which seemed as gray as the sky above the mine that morning. “My sister.”

Lauren Cavanaugh. Well known in Tamarack County for her unflagging efforts to bring artistic enlightenment to the North Country. Two years earlier, she’d founded the Northern Lights Center for the Arts, an artists’ retreat in Aurora that had, in a very short time, acquired a national reputation.

“I thought I read in the Sentinel that Lauren was in Chicago,” Cork said.

“She might be. I don’t know. Or she might be in New York or San Francisco or Paris.”

“I’m not sure I understand.”

“Is what I tell you confidential?”

“I consider it so, Max.”

Cavanaugh folded his hands atop his reflection in the shiny tabletop. “My sister does this sometimes. Just takes off. But she’s always kept in touch with me, let me know where she’s gone.”

“Not this time?”

“Not a word.”

“Nothing before she left?”

“No. But that’s not unusual. When she gets it into her head to go, she’s gone, just like that.”

“What about Chicago?”

He shook his head. “A smoke screen. I put that story out there.”

“Is her car gone?”

“Yes.”

“When did you last hear from her?”

“A week ago. We spoke on the phone.”

“How did she sound?”

“Like she always sounds. Like sunshine if it had a voice.”

Cork took out the little notebook and pen that he generally carried in his shirt pocket when he was working a case. He flipped the cover and found the first empty page.

“She drives a Mercedes, right?”

“A CLK coupe, two-door. Silver-gray.”

“Do you know the license plate number?”

“No, but I can get it.”

“So can I. Don’t bother.”

“She hasn’t charged any gas since she left.”

“How do you know?”

“I oversee all her finances. She also hasn’t charged any hotel rooms, any meals, anything.”

“Any substantial withdrawals from her bank account before she left?”

“Nothing extraordinary.”

“Is it possible she’s staying with a friend?”

“I’ve checked with everyone I can think of.”

“Have you talked to the police?”

“No. I’d rather handle this quietly.”

“You said she does this periodically. Why?”

Cavanaugh looked at Cork, his eyes staring out of a mist of confusion. “I don’t know exactly. She claims she needs to get away from her life.”

As far as Cork knew, her life consisted of lots of money and lots of adulation. What was there to run from?

“Is there someplace she usually goes?”

“Since she moved here, it’s generally the Twin Cities or Chicago. In the past, it’s been New York City, Sydney, London, Buenos Aires, Rome.”

“For the museums?”

He frowned. “Not amusing, Cork.”

“My point is what does she do there?”

“I don’t know. I don’t ask. Can you find her?”

“From what you’ve told me, she could be anywhere in the world.”

He shook his head. “She left her passport.”

“Well, that narrows it down to a couple of million square miles here in the U.S.”

“I don’t need your sarcasm, Cork. I need your help.”

“Does she have a cell phone?”

“Of course. I’ve been calling her number since she left.”

“We can get her cell phone records, see if she’s called anyone or taken calls from anyone. Did she pack a suitcase?”

“No, but sometimes when she takes off, she just goes and buys whatever she needs along the way.”

“According to her credit card records, not this time?”

“Not this time.”

“Does she use a computer? Have an e-mail account?”

“Yes.”

“Any way to check her e-mails?”

“I already have. There’s been no activity since last Sunday, and nothing in the communication before that that seems relevant.”

“Is it possible she has an account you don’t know about?”

“It’s possible but not probable.”

“How did you manage to get her e-mail password?”

“We’re close,” he said, and left it at that.

“Look, Max, there’s something I need to say.”

“Say it.”

“I have two grown daughters and a teenage son. It strikes me that I have less control, less access to their private lives than you have with your sister. Frankly, it seems odd.”

Cavanaugh stared at him. His eyes were the hard green-brown of turtle shells. Cork waited.

“My sister is flamboyant,” Cavanaugh finally said. “She inspires. She walks into a room and the place becomes electric, brighter and more exciting. People fall in love with her easily, and they’ll follow her anywhere. In this way, she’s charmed. But she has no concept of how to handle money. The truth is that financially she’s a walking disaster. Consequently, for most of her life, I’ve overseen her finances. It hasn’t been easy. There have been issues.”

“Recently?”

He hesitated. “This arts center of hers. She gifted it significantly from her own resources—our resources. The idea was that other avenues of financing would then be found. They haven’t materialized. I’ve been bleeding money into this project for some time now.”

“Do you have the ability to bleed?”

“There’s plenty of money. That’s not the point.”

“The point is her unreliability?”

He considered Cork’s question, as if searching for a better answer, then reluctantly nodded.

“One more question. Has your sister received any threats related to the situation at Vermilion One?”

“No. She’s not associated with this at all. The mine is my business.”

“All right.” Cork quoted his usual daily rate, then added, “A five-thousand-dollar bonus if I find her.”

“I don’t care what it takes. Will this interfere with your investigation of the mine threats?”

“I’m sure I can handle them both. I’ll prepare the paperwork. Will you be around this afternoon?”

“I have a meeting until four, but I’ll be at my home this evening.”

Cork said, “I’ll drop by. Say around six?”

“Thanks, Cork. But I’m hoping you’ll begin this investigation immediately.”

“I’m already on the clock.”

Published 2011

A terrible storm on the vast Lake of the Woods strands Cork O’Connor and his daughter Jenny on a devastated island, where they discover the body of a murdered young woman. Hidden nearby is her baby, still alive. The O’Connors soon find themselves pursued by a group of religious zealots who desperately want the baby dead. One of the most suspenseful in my series and based, in part, on a true occurrence.

CHARACTERS INTRODUCED

AARON HOUSEMAN: Jenny O’Connor’s bewildered boyfriend.

TOM KRETSCH: Deputy sheriff for Lake of the Woods County, Minnesota, a man for whom the badge is more than an empty symbol.

SETH BASCOMBE: Longtime resort owner on Lake of the Woods, who knows not only the history of the residents in Minnesota’s remote Northwest Angle but also the secrets they try to hide.

LYNN BELGEA: Nurse-practitioner in Young’s Bay Landing on Lake of the Woods.

BABS LARSON: Resident of Angle Inlet on the Northwest Angle.

NOAH SMALLDOG: An infamous Ojibwe smuggler.

THE HORNETT FAMILY—SARAH, GABRIEL, and JOSHUA: Members of a militant religious sect called the Church of the Seven Trumpets.

AN EXCERPT FROM NORTHWEST ANGLE

Later, when it no longer mattered, they learned that the horror that had come from the sky had a name: derecho.

At the time, all they knew was that the day had begun with deceptive calm. Rose was up early, though not as early as the men, who’d risen at first light and had taken the dinghy across the broad channel to fish. She made coffee and sat on the deck of the houseboat and said her daily prayers while a bright lemon sun rose above the lake and islands. She began with a prayer of thanksgiving for all she had—especially her husband and her family—then, as always, prayed mostly for the people who, in life, despaired. She prayed for those whom she knew personally and for the greater multitude she didn’t. At last, she said her amen and gave herself over to the pure pleasure of the still morning.

Anne was up next and then Jenny, and the three women sat in deck chairs on the forward platform, sipping coffee, talking quietly, watching the sun crawl the sky, waiting for the men.

When she heard the dinghy’s old outboard cutting through the morning calm, Rose got up and said, “I’ll start the potatoes.”

Anne stood up, too. “Let me give a hand, Aunt Rose.”

“No,” she said. “You and Jenny sit. Talk. It’s what sisters should do. You almost never see each other these days.”

She went to the galley to prepare breakfast. She planned to roast potatoes with onions and red peppers and tomatoes. She thought she would scramble eggs with chives and cream cheese. She would slice melons and strawberries and toss them in a bowl with plenty of fat blueberries. And there would be, she was almost certain, fresh fish to fry.

She heard the men as they pulled alongside and tied up to the houseboat and clambered aboard. She heard Cork say, “Beer and pretzels,” and she hoped he wasn’t talking about breakfast.

Mal stepped into the galley, smiling hugely, and held up a stringer full of fat yellow perch. “The hunter home from the hill,” he said.

“You shot them?” Rose replied. “Not very sporting.”

Mal kissed her cheek and started toward the sink.

“Uh-uh,” she said. “Those get cleaned on deck.” She took him gently and turned him toward the door. “When you have them filleted, bring them in and I’ll fry them up.”

Stephen came in and went straight to the canister Rose had filled with chocolate chip cookies the day before. He took a handful and said, “Okay, Aunt Rose?”

“Don’t spoil your breakfast.”

“Are you kidding? I could eat a moose. Can I have some milk, too?”

He left with the cookies and a plastic tumbler filled to the brim. Moments later, Rose heard him talking with his sisters on deck and laughing.

The rented houseboat had a table large enough for all of them to gather around, and they ate amid the clatter of flatware against plates and the lively symphony of good conversation. Anne and Jenny offered to clean up, and they gave Stephen a hard time until he agreed to help. Mal showered, then Cork, and afterward both men settled down to a game of cribbage. The kids finished the dishes, put on their swimsuits, and dove into the lake. Rose set a deck chair in the shade under the forward awning of the houseboat. She sat down to read, but her mind quickly began to wander.

Nearly two years had passed since Jo had been lost in the Wyoming Rockies. Nearly two years dead. And Rose stilled missed her sister. Her deep grieving had ended, but there was a profound sense of something lacking in her life. She had taken to calling this the Great Empty. The kids—“kids” she thought them, though Jenny was twenty-four, Anne twenty-one, and Stephen almost fifteen—splashed and laughed in the water, yet she knew that they felt the Great Empty, too. Cork never talked about his own feelings, and Rose understood that the avoidance itself was probably a sign he was afflicted as well. She wished she knew how to help them all heal fully. In the days when he’d been a priest, Mal had often dealt with death and its aftermath, and he advised her that healing came in its own time and the best you could hope for was to help ease the pain along the way.

“And does everyone heal in the end?” she’d asked her husband.

“Not everyone,” he’d said. “At least, not in my experience.”

She watched the kids in the water and Cork at the table slapping down his cards, and she breathed in the pine-scented air above that distant, isolated lake, and she prayed, “Let us heal, Lord. Let us all be whole again.”

•   •   •

In the early afternoon, Cork said, “It’s time, Jenny.”

She looked up from the table where she’d been writing, put the pencil in the crease between the pages, closed her notebook, and stood.

“How long will it take?” she asked.

“Less than an hour, if we go directly. But today we’re going to make a little side trip.”

“Where?”

“You’ll see.”

Her father liked mysteries, large and small. She understood it was part of what drew him through life, the need to find answers. In a way, it was also what drove her, but they went about it differently. He’d been a cop most of his life and now he was a PI. She, on the other hand, was a writer.

Stephen came from the galley, one hand filled with potato chips. “Can I go?”

“Not this time,” his father said. “Jenny and I have things to discuss.”

Things to discuss, she thought. Oh, God.

“Ah, come on,” Stephen said.

Cork shook his head. “Oz has spoken. But if you want to help, go fill the motor on the dinghy with gas.”

“I didn’t say I wanted to help. I said I wanted to go.”

“And now you’re going to help,” Cork said. He turned to Jenny. “Wear your swimsuit and bring your camera.”

“Why?”

“You’ll see.”

Mysteries, she thought with a silent sigh. But maybe, if they were interesting enough, they would keep her father away from the things he wanted to discuss.

•   •   •

Early September. The air thick on the lake and the sky a weighty blue. The weather, he’d been told, was unusual for that time of year so far north. Hot beyond anyone’s memory. Usually by the end of August fall was already solidly in the air. But not this year. The intense heat of the afternoon was bearable only because of the wind generated by the dinghy speeding over smooth water.

Though they were in Canada, Cork knew he could just about throw a stone onto U.S. territory. They were on the Lake of the Woods, a body of water roughly eighty miles long and sixty miles wide, containing over fourteen thousand islands. That’s what he’d been told in Kenora, anyway. The lake straddled the U.S.-Canadian border. Border? Cork shook his head, thinking how easily that international marker was crossed on this lake. There was no line on the water to delineate one nation from the other. Kitchimanidoo, the Creator, had made the land a boundless whole. It was human beings who felt the need for arbitrary divisions and drew the lines. Too often, he thought, in human blood.

He held the tiller of the little Evinrude outboard, guiding the dinghy southwesterly across broad, open water toward a gathering of islands humped along the horizon. In the half hour since they’d left the houseboat, he hadn’t exchanged a word with Jenny. Which, he strongly suspected, was just fine with her.

The lake was beautiful and, like so many things of beauty, deceptive. The water that day was like glass. The vast size of the lake suggested depth, but Cork knew that beneath the tranquil surface lay reefs and rocks that in the blink of an eye could slit a hull or chew the blades off a prop. He’d been using GPS to follow the main channel between the islands and had been keeping a good speed. But south of Big Narrows he swung the boat west out of the channel, slowed to a crawl, and entered an archipelago composed of dozens of islands, large and small. The shorelines were rocky, the interiors covered with tall pine and sturdy spruce and leafy poplar. Cork eased the boat patiently along, studying the screen of the Garmin GPS mounted to the dash, into which he’d downloaded a program for Lake of the Woods. The water was the color of weak green tea, and he told Jenny, who sat in the bow, to keep her eyes peeled for snags that the GPS couldn’t possibly indicate. After fifteen minutes of careful navigation, he guided the dinghy up to the rocky edge of a small island. He eased the bow next to a boulder whose top rose from the water like the head of a bald man, and he cut the engine.

“Grab the bow line and jump ashore,” he told Jenny.

She leaped to the boulder, rope in hand.

“Can you tie us off?”

She slid a few feet down the side of the boulder and leaped nimbly to shore, where she tied the boat to a section of rotting fallen timber.

Cork stepped to the bow, leaped to the boulder, then to shore.

“Got your camera?” he asked.

Jenny patted her belt where her Canon hung in a nylon case.

“Okay,” Cork said. “Let’s take a hike.”

The island was nearly bare of vegetation and was dominated by a rock formation that rose conelike at the center. Cork led the way along the rock slope, following the vague suggestion of a trail that gradually spiraled upward around the cone. All around them lay a gathering of islands so thick that no matter which way Cork looked they appeared to form a solid shoreline. Between the islands ran a confusing maze of narrow channels.

“Where are we?” Jenny asked.

“Someplace not many folks know about. Probably the only ones who do are Shinnob.”

He used the word that was shorthand for the Anishinaabeg, the First People, who were also known as Ojibwe or Chippewa. Anishinaabe blood ran through Cork and, therefore, through his daughter Jenny.

“On a map, this island doesn’t have a name,” Cork said. “But Shinnobs call it Neejawnisug.”

“What does it mean?”

“I’ll tell you in a minute.”

They reached the top, which was crowned by a great white stone that looked as if it had been cleaved by an ax. The southern side was rounded and pocked, but the north side was a solid face ten feet tall. It lay in full sunlight, golden, and when Jenny saw that glowing face of rock, her eyes went large.

“Pictographs,” she said. “They’re beautiful, Dad. Do you know what they mean?”

Cork studied the figures painted in ocher that covered the face of the stone.

“Henry Meloux told me they’re a kind of invocation to Kitchimanidoo for safety. He said the Anishinaabeg who drew them were being pursued by Dakota and had come to hide. They left the children here, and that’s why they call it Neejawnisug. It means ‘the children.’ They left the women, too, and went off to fight the enemy. They trusted this place because there are so many islands and so many channels that it’s almost impossible to find your way here.”

“You found it easily enough.”

“When I was sixteen, Henry brought me. Giigiwishimowin,“ Cork said.

“Your vision quest,” Jenny interpreted.

“By then it was no longer a common practice among the Ojibwe,” Cork said. “But Henry insisted.”

“Why here?”

“He never told me.”

“Did you receive your vision?”

“I did.”

Jenny didn’t ask about her father’s dream vision, and if she had, he probably wouldn’t have told her.

“Have you been here since?”

“Never.”

“How did you find it so easily? I mean, after so many years?”

“I spent a long afternoon coming here with Henry. He made me memorize every twist and turn.”

“That had to be forty years ago. A long time to remember.”

“You mean for an old man.”

“I couldn’t find my way back here.”

“If it was important, I bet you could.”

Jenny snapped photos of the drawings on the stone and, for a long time, was silent. “And did Kitchimanidoo hide the children successfully?” she finally asked.

“I don’t know. Nor did Henry.”

He could see her mind working, and that was one of the reasons he’d brought her. Unanswered questions were part of what drove her. He was uncertain how to broach the other reason he’d asked her to come.

“God, it’s hot,” Jenny said, looking toward the sun, which baked them. “Not even a breath of wind.”

“Dog days.”

“Not technically,” she said.

“Technically?” He smiled. “So when are dog days? Technically.”

“According to the Farmers’ Almanac, the forty days from July third through August eleventh.”

He shook his head. “You’re way too precise in your thinking. Your mom, she was the same way.”

Jenny brought her gaze to bear on her father. “She was a lawyer. She had to be precise. Legal strictures. I’m a journalist. Lots of the same strictures apply.” She looked away, down at the water a hundred feet below. “Mind if I take a dip before we go on?”

“No. Mind if I join you?”

They descended the cone and retraced their path to the boulder where the boat was secured. They’d worn their bathing suits under their other clothing, and they quickly stripped. Jenny slipped into the water first and Cork followed.

The lake had been warming all summer, but even so it still held a chill that was a wonderful relief to the heat of the day.

“So?” Cork said, in clumsy opening.

His daughter turned her head to the sky and closed her eyes and lay on her back, so that her ears were below the surface and she could pretend not to hear him.

“I just want to know one thing. And I know you can hear me.”

“It starts with one thing,” she said with her eyes still closed. “It ends up everything. That’s how you operate.”

“Old dog, old trick,” he said, waited a moment, then repeated, “So?”

She righted herself, treaded water, and gave in. “All right, what do you want to know?”

“Are you going to marry him?”

“That’s a complicated question.”

“I think the question is fairly simple.”

“Well, I can’t answer it.”

“Because of you or him?”

“It’s a decision we’re both involved in.”

“You’d tell your mother,” he said.

“She wouldn’t put me on the rack.”

“Have I?”

“You will if you don’t get an answer.”

“I suppose you’ve talked to Aunt Rose.”

She didn’t reply, but her silence itself gave him his answer.

“But you won’t talk to me.”

“There are things women understand, Dad.”

“There are things fathers should be let in on. Look, I don’t know why you can’t give me a straightforward answer, and that’s what concerns me.”

“There are issues we need to settle first.”

“Children?”

“Ah, children,” she said, as if she suddenly understood. “That’s why you brought me here to show me those pictographs. This is all about children, isn’t it?”

“Not completely. But you indicated there are issues,” he said. “And I’m betting that’s one. He doesn’t want them, does he?”

“Maybe it’s me who doesn’t.”

“Is it?” Again, her silence was his answer. “You’ve been down this road before, Jenny.”

“See? Right there.” She lifted her arm and pointed an accusing finger at him. Water dripped from the tip in crystal pearls. “That’s why I don’t talk to you.”

“It was only an observation.”

“It was a criticism, and you know it.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“I’m finished swimming. Let’s go.”

He’d blown it. In his imagining, the discussion had gone differently, had ended with them understanding each other, touching heart to heart in the way they used to when she was much younger. Instead he watched her breaststroke away from him to the dinghy, leaving him feeling stupid and treading water.

They threaded their way out of the convoluted gathering of islands. Jenny sat rigid in the bow, fiercely giving him her back. As soon as they hit the open water of the main channel, he headed the dinghy again toward the southwest.

When he saw the sky there, he was, for a moment, stunned breathless.

“Dad?” Jenny said from the bow. She’d seen it, too, and she turned back to him, fear huge in her eyes.

“Good God Almighty,” he whispered.

Published 2012

Suspicion falls on Cork O’Connor when one of his arrows is responsible for the death of Jubal Little, the man sure to be Minnesota’s next governor. To clear his name, Cork must piece together the puzzle of the powerful and corrupt politician who was once his best friend.

CHARACTERS INTRODUCED

JUBAL LITTLE: Former professional football player turned politician, boyhood friend of Cork O’Connor, and man enamored of power.

CAMILLA LITTLE: Wealthy, long-suffering wife of Jubal Little.

WINONA CRANE: A beautiful, mysterious Ojibwe woman whom Cork once loved.

WILLIE CRANE: Winona Crane’s brother, a talented man undaunted by his lifelong struggle with cerebral palsy.

JOHN BERGLUND: A savvy tracker for the U.S. Border Patrol.

AN EXCERPT FROM TRICKSTER’S POINT

The walls of the interrogation room of the Tamarack County Sheriff’s Department were dull gray and completely bare. There were no windows. It was furnished with two chairs and a plain wooden table nudged into a corner. The subject of an interview sat in a straight-back chair with four legs that rested firmly on the floor. The interviewer’s chair had rollers, which allowed movement toward or away from the subject. On the ceiling was what appeared to be a smoke detector but, in reality, concealed a video camera and microphone that fed to a monitor and recording system in the room next door. The interview room was lit from above by diffuse fluorescent lighting that illuminated without glare. Everything had been designed to be free from any distraction that might draw the subject’s focus away from the interviewer and the questions. Cork knew this because he’d had the room constructed during his own tenure as sheriff of Tamarack County.

Although he wore no watch and there was nothing in the room that would have clued him about time, Cork knew it was late afternoon. Around five o’clock, more or less. Captain Ed Larson had removed his own watch, a standard procedure when questioning a suspect in the interview room. Timelessness was part of the protocol for keeping the subject focused only on what was happening inside the small box created by those four bare walls. This was Cork’s third round of questioning about the death of Jubal Little that day and was the most formal so far.

The first interview had taken place at Trickster’s Point while the techs were processing the crime scene. It had been Sheriff Marsha Dross herself who’d asked the questions. Cork was pretty sure nobody really thought then that he’d killed Jubal Little. Marsha was just trying to get a good sense of what had gone down. It wasn’t until he told her that he’d sat for three hours while Jubal died that she gave him a look of incomprehension, then of suspicion.

The second interview had been conducted an hour and a half later in her office back at the department. Ed Larson had been present for that one. He was in charge of major crimes investigation for Tamarack County. He’d let Marsha ask the questions—more of them this time and more probing—and had mostly observed. At the end of that round, he’d asked if Cork was hungry and would like something to eat or drink. Cork wanted nothing, but he said yes anyway.

While the food was coming, they moved to the interview room, just Larson and Cork this time, but Cork knew that Dross would be watching on the monitor next door.

Deputy Azevedo brought in the meal. He looked at Cork as if he didn’t know him at all, though they’d been acquainted for years.

“On the table,” Larson told him, and the deputy set the tray down and left. “Go ahead and eat, Cork,” Larson said. “I just want to look over a few of my notes.”

He pulled a small notepad from the inside pocket of his sport coat. Larson always looked and dressed more like a college professor than a cop. He had gold wire-rim glasses and wore honest-to-God tweed jackets with patches on the elbows. He was nearing sixty, more than a half dozen years older than Cork, and still had an enviable head of hair that was a distinguished silver-black. He was already on the force when Cork first joined as a deputy more than twenty years before. They’d become friends, and Cork had a great deal of respect for him and his abilities. As soon as Cork was elected sheriff, he’d put Larson in charge of investigating major crimes.

While Cork sat at the table and ate, Larson pretended to go over his notes. Cork knew that, in reality, Larson was more interested in his appetite, knew that people who’d committed a violent crime were often so troubled by what they’d done that they couldn’t eat. So Cork made as if he hadn’t had a bite of food in a month and rammed down every crumb of his cheeseburger and gulped every drop of coffee.

“Thanks,” he said when he’d finished.

Larson looked up from his notepad and, with his index finger, eased his glasses a quarter of an inch higher on the bridge of his nose. It was a gesture he sometimes made unconsciously when he was about to do something that was uncomfortable for him. “Cork, I know you know the drill. I’ve got to make sure that you understand your rights.”

“Miranda,” Cork said.

“Miranda,” Larson acknowledged and went through the litany.

“It’s official then?” Cork said.

“What’s official?”

“I’m officially a suspect.”

Larson squinted, a look of pain. “In my shoes, how would you see it?”

“I’ve been in your shoes. And I know how I’d see it, Ed. If our situations were reversed, I wouldn’t believe for a moment that you’d killed Jubal Little.”

“Tell me why, if I were in your shoes, I would have waited three hours before trying to get him some help.”

“I wasn’t trying to get him help. He was already dead when I left him.”

“Okay, so why didn’t you go for help as soon as you understood the seriousness of the situation?”

“I’ve told you. Jubal asked me to stay.”

“Because he was afraid?”

“Jubal?” Cork shook his head. “No, not Jubal. Never Jubal.”

“You were his only hope of surviving, and yet he insisted that you stay. I don’t understand.”

“He knew he was going to die, and he didn’t want to die alone.”

“You couldn’t have carried him out?”

“He hurt whenever I tried to move him, hurt a lot. It was that broadhead arrow tip tearing him up inside. I didn’t want to give him any more pain. If I’d tried to carry him out, he would simply have died sooner.”

“So you just sat there and watched him go?”

“No. I listened to him. I think that was the main reason he didn’t want me to leave. He wouldn’t have had anyone to talk to. You know how politicians are.”

Larson gave a startled look that quickly turned critical. “There’s nothing humorous in this situation, Cork.”

“I’m not sure Jubal saw it that way. The last thing he did on this earth was smile, Ed.”

He could see that Larson didn’t believe him. Probably he didn’t believe a lot of what Cork had said so far.

“Did you have your cell phone with you?”

Cork shook his head. “We were out there to get away from a world of phone calls. But even if I’d taken my cell phone, it wouldn’t have mattered.”

“Why?”

“Coverage is hit and miss up there. But around Trickster’s Point, especially, nothing gets through.”

“And why’s that?”

Cork shrugged. “Ask the Ojibwe, and they’d tell you it’s just Nanaboozhoo messing with you.”

“Nanaboozhoo?”

“The Trickster. That’s his territory.”

Larson stared at him. His face reminded Cork of a ceramic doll with all the features painted on and none of them capable of moving. Larson looked down at his notes. “You had breakfast at Johnny’s Pinewood Broiler before you headed out. You had a cheese omelet, and Jubal Little had cakes and eggs over easy. When you left, you both spent a few minutes standing out on the sidewalk, arguing.”

Cork said, “Did you find Heidi or did she come looking for you?”

He was talking about Heidi Steger, their waitress at the Broiler that morning.

Larson didn’t answer but said instead, “What did you argue about?”

“We didn’t argue. It was more like a heated discussion.”

“What did you discuss, then, so heatedly?”

“Politics, Ed. Just politics.”

Larson maintained his ceramic doll face for a long moment, and Cork, in that same long moment, returned his steady gaze.

“Okay,” Larson finally went on. “You said he talked a lot as he was dying. What did he talk about?”

“First he talked about that arrow, whether to try to remove it. Jubal wanted to, I didn’t. Then I tried to leave to get help. Jubal wanted me to stay. After that, he talked about life. Or I should say his life. It was so Jubal of him, but understandable under the circumstances. He had a lot of regrets. Toward the end, he was in and out of consciousness. When he was awake, he mostly rambled. It was hard to make much sense of anything.”

“Did he say who’d shot him?”

“He didn’t have to. We both knew who he believed it was.”

“Who was that?”

“He thought it was me.”

“He thought you were trying to kill him?”

“He thought I’d shot him by accident.” Which was the only lie Cork had told in any of the interviews that day.

“Did you?”

“No.”

“You meant to shoot him with that arrow?”

Cork refrained from smiling at the obvious and shallow trap and told him once again, “It wasn’t me who shot Jubal.”

“Who then?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did you see anyone else?”

“No.”

“Hear anyone else?”

“No.”

“So, as far as you know, you were both alone out there?”

“Clearly not. Whoever shot that arrow was out there with us.”

In the beginning, Larson had positioned his chair near to Cork, making the interrogation a more intimate affair, just between the two of them. Between friends, maybe. Now he backed off a couple of feet and asked, rather indifferently, “Do you consider yourself a good bow hunter, Cork?”

“Fair to middling.”

“When you hunt, you’re a purist, right? You do still-stalking. No deer blind. You actually track the animal on foot.”

“That’s right.”

“I’m guessing you’d have to be tuned in to all the sounds around you, wouldn’t you? Reading all the signs?”

Cork understood the thrust of Larson’s questions. If there was someone else at Trickster’s Point with them, why didn’t Cork know it?

“Must take incredible stealth,” Larson said.

“That all depends on what you’re after,” Cork replied.

“You were after white-tail deer, weren’t you?”

Cork said, “Ed, what I was really after is something you can’t understand, and if I say it, you’ll misconstrue my meaning.”

“I’ll do my best to understand.” He promised with such earnest appeal that Cork knew he was telling the truth.

So Cork offered his own truth in return. He said, “I was hunting Jubal Little.”

Published 2013

The sins of the father are visited on the son as a vengeful man sets out to make Cork O’Connor—or someone he loves dearly—pay the penalty for a wrong done long ago.

CHARACTERS INTRODUCED

MARLEE DAYCHILD: A vivacious Ojibwe teenager and eager girlfriend of Stephen O’Connor.

STELLA DAYCHILD: Marlee Daychild’s mother, a wisewoman who’s wrestled hard times and come out on top, more or less.

SKYE EDWARDS: A wealthy friend of Annie O’Connor from California, who has more than a passing interest in the O’Connor family.

RAY JAY WAKEMUP: A troubled member of the Iron Lake Band of Ojibwe.

CECIL LAPOINTE: An incarcerated Ojibwe who channels a Native spirit called White Eagle.

RALPH CARTER: A cantankerous, retired county judge, the kind of man who might murder in a fit of rage.

AN EXCERPT FROM TAMARACK COUNTY

Like many men and women who’ve worn a badge for a good part of their lives, Corcoran Liam O’Connor was cursed. Twice cursed, in reality. Cursed with memory and cursed with imagination.

In his early years, Cork had worked for the Chicago PD, the South Side. Then he’d spent a couple of decades in the khaki uniform of the Tamarack County Sheriff’s Department, first as a deputy and finally as sheriff. He’d seen the aftermath of head-on collisions, of carelessness or drunkenness around farm or lumbering equipment, of bar fights with broken bottles and long-bladed knives, of suicide and murder in every manner. And so the first curse: he remembered much, and much of his memory was colored in blood.

The second curse came mostly from the first. Whenever he heard about a violent incident, he inevitably imagined the details.

And so, when he finally understood the truth of what happened to Evelyn Carter, he couldn’t keep himself from envisioning how her final moments must have gone. This is what, in his mind’s eye, he saw:

It was seven o’clock in the evening, ten days before Christmas. The streets of Aurora, Minnesota, were little valleys between walls of plowed snow. It was snowing again, lightly at that moment, a soft covering that promised to give a clean face to everything. The shops were lit with holiday lights and Christmas trees and Santa figures and angels. There were people on the sidewalks, carrying bags and bundles, gifts for under the trees. They knew one another, most of them, and their greetings were sincere good wishes for the season.

Evelyn Carter was among them. She was small, not quite seventy. All her life she’d been a good-looking woman and had taken good care of herself, so she was attractive still. She wore an expensive coat trimmed with fox fur, purchased when she’d visited her daughter in New York City in October. On her head was a warm gray bucket hat made of rabbit’s fur. In her left hand, she gripped a shopping bag filled with little gifts, stocking stuffers. A cell phone was cradled in the gloved palm of her right hand, and she stood on the sidewalk, looking at a photo of her grandson dressed as a shepherd for the church pageant this coming Sunday. When the door of Lilah Buell’s Sweet Shoppe opened at her back, the smell of cinnamon and cider ghosted around her, and she smiled in the wash of the good spirits that seemed to her a beacon of hope in an otherwise dark winter season.

Her big black Buick was parked on Oak Street, and by the time she reached it and set her shopping bag in the passenger seat, she was tired. Evelyn had a good but troubled heart. She carried nitroglycerin pills in a tiny bottle in her purse. She was feeling some uncomfortable pressure in her chest, and when she’d finally seated herself behind the wheel, she sat for a moment, letting a nitro pill dissolve under her tongue. She hadn’t yet started the engine, and as she sat, the windows gradually fogged from her slow, heavy breathing.

She didn’t see the figure approaching her door.

She was thinking, maybe, about her grandson in Albuquerque, or her daughter in New York City, saddened that all her family had fled Tamarack County and moved so far away. She knew the reason. He was at home, probably staring at the clock, complaining aloud to the empty room that she’d been gone too long and had spent too much. And if it was, in fact, her husband she was thinking of, she probably wasn’t smiling and perhaps her chest hurt a little more. The windows were heavy with condensation, and maybe she felt suddenly isolated and alone, parked a block from the bustle of Center Street and the welcoming lights of the shops. So she finally reached out and turned on the engine. She was undoubtedly startled when the shadow loomed against the window glass near the left side of her face. And that damaged thumper of hers probably started hammering a little harder.

Then she heard the familiar voice. “Hey, Evelyn, you okay in there?”

She pressed the button, and the window glided down.

“Hello, Father Ted.”

It was the priest from St. Agnes, Father Ted Green, bending toward the window and blowing foggy puffs from where he stood on the curb.

“I saw you get in and then nothing,” he explained with a smile that conveyed both reassurance and concern. “I was afraid maybe you were having some difficulty.”

He was young and wore a black leather jacket, which looked good on him. To Evelyn Carter, there’d always been something a little James Dean about him (she was fond of saying so over coffee with her friends), and although that unsettled her a bit during Mass, she didn’t find it at all unpleasant.

“Just tired, Father,” she replied.

His gaze slid to the shopping bag in the passenger seat. “Busy afternoon, looks like. I hope you’re planning on going straight home and getting a little rest.”

“A little rest would be good,” she agreed.

“All right, then. See you Sunday. And please give my best to the Judge.” He straightened and stood erect, smiling a kind of benediction, and he watched as she pulled carefully into the street and drove slowly away. Later, when he reported this conversation, he would say how wan she looked, and that he continued to worry.

She headed past the high school and the gravel pit and took County 6 into the low, wooded hills west of town. The snow was coming down more heavily then, and maybe she was concerned that if it began to fall in earnest, the way it had so often that December, she’d be trapped, alone with her husband until the plows cleared the rural roads. If this was what she was thinking, there was a good chance she was frowning.

Two miles out of Aurora, she approached what everyone in Tamarack County called the Orly cutoff. It was washboard dirt and gravel, but it was the quickest way to get to the tiny crossroads known as Orly, if you were in a hurry. Evelyn Carter and her husband, Ralph, whom everyone except Evelyn called the Judge, lived on the cutoff, whose official name was 127th Street. Through a thick stand of birch and aspen long ago blown bare of leaves, Evelyn could see the lights of her home, which had been built a good hundred yards back from the road at the end of a narrow tongue of asphalt. Their nearest neighbor was a full quarter of a mile farther north, and to Evelyn, the lights of her home looked cold and isolated and uninviting. When the Judge finally passed away, she was planning to sell the house and move to New York City, to live where she had family and where there were people all around her instead of trees and emptiness.

As she approached her driveway, she slowed. It was a difficult angle, and the Buick was enormous and felt awkward in its maneuvering. She always took the turn with great care. When the Judge was with her, he usually complained that she drove like an old woman.

Once she’d negotiated the turn, she stopped abruptly. Someone was kneeling in the middle of the drive. In the headlights, the snow was like a gauzy curtain, and what lay behind it was vague and uncertain. She couldn’t quite make out who it was on his knees on the snow-packed asphalt, head bowed as if in prayer. But then she recognized the red wool cap she’d knitted for her husband the Christmas before, and although she couldn’t make sense of the whole scene, she relaxed and rolled down her window and called out, “What are you doing there, Ralph?”

The figure didn’t move or speak.

“For heaven’s sake, are you all right?” Evelyn was suddenly afraid. Not for her own safety, but for the well-being of her husband. The truth was that, as his faculties had declined and his reliance on her had increased, she’d often imagined his passing, imagined it as if it were the pardon of a long prison sentence. But faced with the actuality of some crisis, her natural response was concern. She unsnapped her seat belt, opened the door, and slid from the car, leaving the engine running as she hurried toward the kneeling figure.

Too late, she saw, in the glare of the headlights, the flash of the knife arcing upward to meet her. The blade, large and sharp and made for gutting deer, sliced easily through her fox-fur-trimmed coat and lodged deep in her belly, where the ice-cold steel quickly warmed. And although she was probably too stunned to speak, maybe with a final bewilderment in a life that she’d never really understood anyway, she looked into the face she knew well and asked herself the unanswerable question: Why?

Published 2014

When relatives of Henry Meloux ask Cork O’Connor’s help in locating their runaway daughter, Cork finds himself navigating the dark world of human trafficking. The most issue-oriented and important work in my series, this is a novel the Native community in Minnesota encouraged me to write.

CHARACTERS INTRODUCED

DANIEL ENGLISH: Rainy Bisonette’s nephew, member of the Lac Courte Oreilles Band of Ojibwe, employed as a game warden by the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.

MARIAH ARCENEAUX: An Ojibwe adolescent girl, missing for a year.

LOUISE ARCENEAUX: Mariah Arceneaux’s distraught but determined mother.

RED ARCENEAUX: Mariah Arceneaux’s uncle and faltering protector of his family.

BEA ABBISS: Director of the Nishiime House, dedicated to saving the lives of young Native women who’ve fallen into the hands of the worst kinds of predators.

RAVEN DUVALL: A rebellious, sexually trafficked Ojibwe runaway.

AN EXCERPT FROM WINDIGO ISLAND

Fear is who we are.

Cork’s old friend Henry Meloux had told him that. Though not quite in that way. And it was only part of what the ancient Ojibwe Mide had said. These were his exact words: In every human being, there are two wolves constantly fighting. One is fear, and the other is love. When Cork had asked which of the wolves won the battle, Meloux’s answer had been: The one you feed. Always the one you feed.

In his own life, Cork had known more than his share of fear. He carried scars from multiple gunshot wounds and was scarred, too, in ways that never showed on skin. He’d lost his wife to violence, lost friends in the same manner. More than once, men whose hearts were black holes of hate had targeted his children, and he’d come close to losing them as well. In all this, fear had sometimes been the wolf he’d fed. But as Meloux had wisely observed, love also shaped the human spirit, and it was this element of his being that Cork had consciously done his best to feed. In far more ways than fear, this wolf had shaped the man he was.

There were different kinds of fear, Cork knew, and some had nothing to do with violence. They were sought out purposely, sought for the sake of excitement, an adrenaline rush—a roller-coaster ride, for example, or a ghost story. When he finally began his investigation, Cork discovered that it was the desire for this kind of fear that had brought the three boys to the cursed place the Anishinaabeg called Windigo Island.

When they set out that moonlit night, this was what the boys knew, what all the local kids knew: On Windigo Island, death came in the dark. It came in the form of an awful spirit, a cannibal beast with an insatiable craving for human flesh. Sometimes the beast swept in with the foul odor of carnage pouring off its huge body and a bone-chilling scream leaping from its maw. Sometimes it approached with stealth and wile, and in the moment before it ripped your heart from your chest, it cried your name in a high, keening voice. It could be unpredictable, but one thing was certain: to set foot on Windigo Island in the dead of night was to call forth the worst of what the darkness there held.

They’d shoved off in their kayaks a few minutes before midnight from the marina on the shore of Lake Superior. It was late July, hot, and there was not a breath of wind. A gibbous moon had risen over the Apostle Islands. The water of Kitchigami was black satin, smooth and shiny. Behind them, the lights of the reservation town of Bad Bluff curved along the shoreline of that greatest of the Great Lakes, and the three boys paused in their paddling and turned back to admire the sequined hills. Then wordless, because it was night and an excursion that called for silence, they pushed on, following the path the moonlight burned in silver across the water.

Ahead of them rose the island. It wasn’t much to look at in daylight. A rough circle a couple of dozen yards in diameter, all of it broken rock, an island so tiny it appeared only on detailed nautical charts. From its center rose a tall, ragged pine, a tree that had somehow managed to put down roots in that humping of stone and had held to it tenaciously through season after season of November gales. The Ojibwe believed the pine was a lightning rod of sorts, a beacon attracting the evil spirits of Kitchigami to that cursed island. Not just the windigo but Michi Peshu, too, a monster that lived in the depths, a creature with horns and the face of a panther and razor-sharp spikes down its back and, some said, the body of a serpent. To the boys on that night, the tree looked like a black feather rising stiffly from the head of a skull almost completely submerged. They approached in silence, the only sound the dip of their double-bladed paddles and the burble of water as they stroked. They came at the island from the west and eased their kayaks up to the rocky shoreline. They disembarked one at a time, drew their crafts out of the water, and laid them carefully across the broken stone. The moonlight was intense, casting shadows of the ragged pine boughs across the boys like a black net, and they stood a moment, caught in the eerie mystique of the island.

Then one of the boys farted. The long, low growl broke the spell, and they laughed, released from the grip of their own fear.

“Dude,” one of them said. “You let the windigo know we’re here.”

“Dude,” the offending boy replied, “that was to keep him away.”

The third boy waved a hand in front of his face. “If that smell doesn’t drive him off, nothing will.”

“Okay, what now?” the first asked.

The third boy reached into the opening of his kayak and brought out a knapsack. From it he pulled a can of white spray paint. “We find the biggest rock that faces town.”

Which they did. It stood a good four feet high and had a nice flat vertical surface. In the daylight, it would have been dull gray, but in the shadow of the pine that night, it was as black as char.

The third boy knelt in front of the rock, as if praying, gave the can a good shake, then carefully sprayed his message: KYLE B + LORI D.

“How’s she going to see it?” the second boy asked.

“Binoculars, dude, binoculars. I told her I was going to come out here to do this thing and the hell with the windigo.”

The first boy stood back and admired the other’s work. “Awesome. Totally.”

And that’s when the wind hit.

On a lake like Superior, weather can develop suddenly. That night the wind came out of nowhere, sweeping in from the vast open water. The limbs of the pine began flailing wildly, and waves rose up and crashed against Windigo Island and ate the rocks. No storm cloud obscured the stars or the unblinking eye of the moon, nothing to account for the phantom torrent of air that carried with it a frigid cold churned up from the depths. There was something in this wind that was terrible, something unnatural, and the boys could feel it. They stood frozen, feeding the wolf of fear suddenly prowling inside them.

“Hey, you guys,” the first boy hollered over the cry of wind. “Did you hear that?”

“What?” the third boy shouted.

“I heard it,” the second boy called back. His voice was a high screech because, in his terror, his throat had closed nearly shut. He stared wide-eyed at the third boy. “Your name. It called your name.”

The third boy turned from his companions, turned his face into that furious wind, and listened. He didn’t hear what they’d heard, but he saw something that made his blood run cold. In the black roil of the lake, just beneath the surface, a figure, luminescent white under the glare of the moon, swam toward them.

“Oh, God,” the first boy cried. “Michi Peshu!”

He spun and fled, stumbling over the broken rocks toward his kayak. The second boy was close on his heels. The third boy turned, too, but caught his foot in a crevice between two stones and his ankle gave in an agonizing twist. He went down with a cry of pain that was snatched away by the wind. His companions didn’t hear. They were already on the water, already digging the blades of their paddles into the swells. The boy cried out for them, but they didn’t look back.

Then he heard it. What they’d heard. His name. His name called in a high, keening voice that was carried inside the howl of wind. And he saw the white form sliding toward him in the black water, the monster Michi Peshu coming, and he watched it slither onto the rocks, and he knew a fear such as he’d never known before.

The wolf inside him opened its hungry mouth and prepared to feed.

Published 2016

A man has gone missing in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. The official search, which turned up nothing, has been terminated. The man’s family hires Cork to return to that vast wilderness to continue the search. But when Cork himself goes missing, it falls to those who love him to unravel the mystery at the heart of these disappearances. Although none of them could possibly know it, not only is Cork’s life at stake but the lives of hundreds of innocent people also hang in the balance.

CHARACTERS INTRODUCED

LINDSAY HARRIS: A staunch environmentalist and graduate student, and a young woman very concerned about her grandfather, who has gone missing in the Boundary Waters.

TREVOR HARRIS: Lindsay’s brother, resident of Las Vegas, a sometime actor more interested in the action on a blackjack table than in the welfare of his family.

JOHN W. HARRIS: The missing man, a renowned and wealthy geotechnical engineer, architect of some of the world’s great modern dams, born and raised in Aurora, Minnesota, and at one time a good friend and mentor to Cork O’Connor.

LEAH DULING: Rainy Bisonette’s aunt, an important and resentful figure out of Henry Meloux’s past.

AARON COMMANDA: Traditional chief of the White Woman Lake Odawa.

BIRD COMMANDA: Aaron’s young nephew, a kid eager to prove his manhood.

MRS. GRAY: An Odawa conspirator and terrible traveling companion.

AN EXCERPT FROM MANITOU CANYON

In the gray of early afternoon, the canoes drew up to the shoreline of the island. The paddles were stowed. The woman in the bow of the first canoe and the kid in the bow of the second stepped onto the rocks. They held the canoes steady while the men in the stern of each disembarked and joined them. The kid grabbed a rifle from the center of the canoe he’d come in, then lifted a pack. He studied the island and the great stand of red pines that grew there.

“Where to?” he said.

“First, we hide the canoes,” the man who was the oldest and tallest said.

They carried the crafts from the lake a dozen yards into the trees. The tall man in the lead and the woman with him set their canoe behind a fallen pine, and the kid and the other man did the same.

“Want to cover them with boughs or something?” the kid asked.

“Break off boughs and someone will know we were here,” the tall man said. “This’ll do.”

They returned to the shore where they’d left their gear. The kid grabbed his rifle and reached for a pack.

The woman said, “I’ll carry that. You see to your rifle.”

She shouldered the pack, and the tall man started toward the interior of the island. The others followed, wordless and in single file.

On some maps, the island was called by its Ojibwe name: Miskominag. On others, it was called Raspberry. Words in different languages that meant the same thing. They walked inland through the pines, passed bushes that in summer would have been full of berries, but it was the first day of November, and all the plants except the evergreens were bare. They came to a great upthrust of rock, a kind of wall across the island, and the tall man began to climb. The others spread out and found their own ways up. The top of the outcropping stood above the crown of the trees. From there, they could see the whole of the lake, a two-mile-long, horseshoe-shaped body of water three-quarters of a mile across at its widest point. The water of the lake was the same dismal color of both the sky above them and the rock outcropping on which they stood. The gray of despair.

“Where will he come from?” the kid asked, his eyes taking in all that water and shoreline.

“The south,” the tall man said. “Over there.” He pointed toward a spot across the lake.

The kid looked and said, “All I see is trees.”

“Try these.” The tall man unshouldered the pack he’d carried, set it down, and drew out a pair of binoculars. He handed them to the kid, who spent a minute adjusting the lenses.

“Got it. A portage,” the kid said. He returned the binoculars to the man. “What now?”

“We wait.”

The others unburdened themselves of their packs. The shorter of the two men—he had a nose that was like a blob of clay plopped in the middle of his face—took a satellite phone from his pack and walked away from the others.

The woman said to the kid, “Hungry?”

“Famished.”

She pulled deer jerky and an orange from her pack and offered them.

“Wouldn’t mind some hot soup,” the kid said.

“No fires,” the tall man told him.

“He won’t be here for a long time,” the kid said.

“The smoke would be visible for miles. And the smell would carry, too,” the tall man said.

The kid laughed. “Think there’s anybody besides us way the hell out here this time of year?”

“Out here, you never know. Enjoy your jerky and orange.”

The tall man walked away, studying the whole of the lake below. The wall fell off in a vertical cliff face, a tall palisade several hundred yards long. A few aspen had taken root and clung miraculously to the hard, bare rock, but they didn’t obscure the view. There was nowhere on the lake that wasn’t visible from that vantage. The woman followed him.

“He’s too young,” she said with a note of gall. “I told you.”

“He’s strong in the right ways. And a far better shot than me or you, if it comes to that.”

He looked back at the kid, who’d already eaten his jerky and was peeling the orange while intently studying the place along the shoreline where the trees opened onto the portage. The woman was right. He was young. Seventeen. He’d never killed a man, but that’s what he was there for. To do this thing, if necessary.

“When the time comes,” the tall man said, “if he has to do it, he’ll be fine.” He turned from the woman and rejoined the others.

The man with the formless nose said, “Sat phone’s a problem. These clouds.”

“Did you get through?”

“Only enough to say we made it. Then I lost the signal.”

“That’ll do.”

The kid sat on a rock and cradled his rifle in his lap. He leaned forward and looked at the lake, the trees, the shoreline, the place where the man would come.

“Does he have a name?” the kid asked.

“What difference does it make?” the woman said.

“I don’t know. Just wondered.”

“Everyone has a name,” the woman said.

“So what’s his?”

“Probably better you don’t know. That way, he’s just a target.”

The tall man said, “His name’s O’Connor. Cork O’Connor.”

The kid lifted his rifle, sighted at the shoreline.

Behind him, the woman whispered, “Bang.”

A CONVERSATION

Q: Thunder Bay was the first of your novels to step back in time—in this case, the 1920s, when series favorite Henry Meloux was a young man. Would you consider it the most romantic of your novels?

A: The theme of the story involves the sacrifices we’re willing to make in the name of love. But I’m not sure I would call the novel romantic. It certainly contains some of the most erotic scenes I’ve written in the series. It’s also my favorite Cork O’Connor novel because at heart it’s the story of Henry Meloux.

Q: Vermilion Drift goes back to Cork’s childhood in the 1960s. Did this exploration into his past mark another milestone in the series?

A: I enjoyed tremendously exploring an important period in Cork’s childhood. It allowed me not only to imagine Cork as a boy but also to imagine his father and mother. His parents were long dead when readers first met him in Iron Lake, but their profound influence in shaping him is alluded to many times across the course of the series. Whenever you explore the deep background of a character, you open yourself to surprises, and I think, in the end, you understand that character far better.

Q: Which novel in the Cork series have you received the most questions or comments about from readers? You say that Thunder Bay is your favorite novel in the series. What about your fans?

A: Fan favorites span just about every book in the series. My own belief is that very often readers’ favorites are the first they pick up in the series, whichever they happen to be. I love hearing from readers who tell me a more recent title is their favorite just as much as hearing from those for whom it’s Iron Lake. However, the book that has generated the most controversial response was Heaven’s Keep, because a significant character, one whom many readers had come to love, dies in the course of this story. Oh, did I break readers’ hearts with that one.

Q: As Cork’s children—Jenny, Annie, and Stephen—have gotten older, they’ve played larger roles in Cork’s investigations. Jenny worked right beside Cork in Windigo Island, and Stephen got so involved he was shot in Tamarack County. Talk about the role that family plays in the series and how it’s evolved.

A: From the beginning, who Cork O’Connor is and how he conducts himself have been largely influenced by the fact that he’s a devoted father. His family is at the heart of all he loves. As his children have grown, become adults, they’ve quite naturally assumed larger roles in the stories. Sometimes a story will highlight a specific child, and sometimes all the children play significant roles. In Manitou Canyon, for example, the fifteenth book in the series, which will be published in September, it falls on the shoulders of Cork’s children, all of them working together, to save their father’s life. I’ve loved watching these kids grow up and become strong human beings. It’s felt to me like a very natural evolution.

Q: Like most crime series, yours contains violence. But unlike many other mysteries, how violence erupts is a real topic that is discussed and debated by Cork and other characters. After the events in Red Knife, Cork decides not to carry a weapon, until circumstances force him to in Trickster’s Point. His reasoning is that violence cannot occur without a weapon. But given his line of work, violence seems to always find him.

A: For me, Red Knife represented an exploration of violence in our culture. I was trying to get at some of the reasons that, in my opinion and despite our rhetoric to the contrary, we seem to pass violence down one generation to the next as a cultural norm. But Cork was born ogichidaa, an Ojibwe word that means “one who stands between evil and his people.” And so time and again, Cork finds himself in situations that result in violence, though he is not the instigator. It’s a kind of curse he cannot escape.

Q: In Vermilion Drift and Windigo Island, Cork’s investigations involve social issues that are as impactful as the crimes committed. Do you intentionally use the mystery formula to address issues that are important to you? Or is it the other way around? Do you find that the challenges we face today, whether they be sex trafficking or nuclear waste disposal, create the perfect circumstances for murder?

A: One of the things I love about writing mysteries is that I’ve learned you can couch a discussion of important social issues within the context of a good, compelling mystery, and even people who don’t necessarily agree with your point of view will still read you and get the idea. How often is it that you have an opportunity to stand on a soapbox and spout off without giving the other side an opportunity for rebuttal? I absolutely love that about what I do. So, yes, I often choose a social issue and the story rises out of that. There are so many important and controversial topics, especially when dealing with the treatment of Native communities in our nation, that I’ll never run dry of inspiration.

Q: Who’s your favorite minor character in the series?

A: I don’t think there are any minor characters in the stories. But there are some terrific characters who’ve come and gone. Of these, my favorite would be Dina Willner, a PI out of Chicago who helps Cork in two novels: Mercy Falls and Copper River. She’s smart, attractive, capable, and there’s clearly chemistry between her and Cork. I get lots of notes from fans asking for her to be brought back. We’ll see.

Q: Who do you consider your most menacing villain?

A: The most deliciously evil character I’ve created, and I’ve created many evil antagonists, is Abigail Hornett, matriarch of the religious fanatics in Northwest Angle. Those who believe they are the chosen of God and use that belief as sword and shield in their justification of violence are, in my own opinion, among the scariest people on earth.

Q: Which villain was the most fun to write? Or do you not find them very much fun, given the serious nature of the crimes in the series?

A: The challenge in writing villains is to make them feel real to readers. No human being is all black or all white, and if you write them as such, you’ve lost your readers. In my own belief system, no one is born bad. Destructive natures are shaped by environment and experience, from something terrible in a human being’s past, and so it’s always an interesting journey trying to get at and write about what it is that shaped a person in a way that makes him or her do evil things.

Q: What is the weirdest or most surprising question anyone has ever asked you at a book event? What is the most thought-provoking?

A: I was asked once if I would ever consider putting zombies in my Cork O’Connor novels. I replied that I would not. There are already enough of those in politics.

Q: Are there any revelations or surprises you can hint at in your upcoming novel, Manitou Canyon?

A: There are several additions to the Cork O’Connor clan in Manitou Canyon. Some are expected, but there are a couple of really nice surprises. One in particular will take Cork down some interesting roads in the future.

Complete Your Collection of Cork O’Connor Mysteries

Iron Lake

Boundary Waters

Purgatory Ridge

Blood Hollow

Mercy Falls

Copper River

Thunder Bay

Red Knife

Heaven's Keep

Vermilion Drift

Northwest Angle

Trickster's Point

Tamarack County

Windigo Island

Manitou Canyon

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A World Beyond Cork: Don't miss your chance to read Ordinary Grace, the spectacular Edgar Award-winning standalone novel by William Kent Krueger

Ordinary Grace

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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2016 by William Kent Krueger

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Atria Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

ebook edition July 2016

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Interior design by Dana Sloan

Cover design by Emma A. Van Deun

Cover photograph by Offset by Shutterstock

All photos courtesy of the author

ISBN 978-1-5011-4004-4 (ebook)

Table of Contents

A Note From Kent

The Books

Iron Lake

Boundary Waters

Purgatory Ridge

Blood Hollow

Mercy Falls

Copper River

Thunder Bay

Red Knife

Heaven’s Keep

Vermilion Drift

Northwest Angle

Trickster’s Point

Tamarack County

Windigo Island

Manitou Canyon

A Conversation

Copyright