Author William Kent Krueger bucks a trend with his series featuring Corcoran "Cork" O'Connor. Other authors have burdened their detectives with ever darker personal problems and self doubts as their sequels piled up. But Krueger started with Cork climbing out of a personal hole, reconciling with his family, and taking care of himself. After I read the third book, I hoped that this "Cork" would "stay buoyant."
I'm happy to report that, at least by the end of book 10, through setbacks, ordeals, and heartbreak, Cork is still learning and growing, along with friends and family.
Cork and his wife Jo have learned parenting on the go. They help their teenage daughters Jenny and Anna be true to their own convictions, no matter what an angry youth minister or fickle boyfriend may say. Jo and Cork take special care with their youngest, Stephen. They don't dismiss his nighttime panics but stay with him. Giving him dogs to care for helps him to mature. By the ninth book Heaven's Keep, Stephen is in his early teens, showing strongly the Ojibwe side of his heritage. When Jo goes missing, Cork lets his young son participate fully in an arduous search.
Cork, through trial and error, is finding his niche where he grew up in Aurora, Minnesota. Son of the late sheriff, he was sheriff for a time, but lost the position. In these books, we see him sheriff again, and we see him decide that's not what he loves to do. When he becomes an official P.I. for his wife's law firm, others who take on the sheriff's position become foils or friends. There's an officious politician in the job, then conscientious old Wally Shanno. Officer Marsha Dross, promoted by Cork himself, once took a bullet for Cork. The partnership of Cork and Dross, characterized by mutual respect and official conflicts of interest, is one of the joys of the series. He is also working through his complex relationship with guns, deciding at one point to give them up, then doubting his decision.
Spiritually, Cork draws more and more on his Ojibwe mentors Henry Meloux and the late Sam Winter Moon. Aside from wisdom we could call secular, they have given him wisdom through myth. More than once, Cork seems to confront a "Windigo," an evil spirit that you can defeat only by becoming a Windigo yourself. More than once, Cork, Henry, and young Stephen have visions that presage events. When Cork asks Henry why visions are always so obscure, I love Henry's answer: like an arrow, the vision goes straight to the target, while we have to follow along behind at a slow pace to get to the point.
The Catholic church has more negative baggage for Cork, but the faith grows in importance throughout these books. Priests in the series include a weak man, a predator, and Father Mal, who leaves the collar to marry Cork's sister-in-law Rose, the beginning of a wholesome new life for both of them. Jesus himself appears in Blood Hollow, bringing peace and healing power to a young Ojibwe man Solemn Winter Moon -- the prime suspect in a murder case. While Annie seems aimed at living a life of devotion, her little brother says "it's all b---s---." While Cork seems to be returning to the church, his Ojibwe mentor Henry integrates both traditions by defining "soul" as "connection with our Creator and deep awareness of our connection with all things created by Him."
There's additional pleasure in Krueger's stretching himself by changing up the expected detective-chases-criminal pattern. He makes Cork the target in Mercy Falls. On the lam far from home in Copper River, Cork recedes to the background for a very affecting story of three teenage outcasts facing violence. Krueger tries first person narrative in Thunder Bay, and he builds his present-day adventure around a saga from Henry Meloux's remote past. Red Knife involves organized gangs. The author's challenge in Heaven's Keep is to maintain interest in a search-and-rescue mission that we already know is doomed. In book 10, Vermilion Drift, Krueger achieves the kind of bizarre twist that Agatha Christie favored: Cork finds a missing person deep in a mine shaft alongside bodies of Ojibwe women whose disappearances were investigated by his father fifty years earlier. The twist? Fifty years apart, the same gun was used in all the killings.
Krueger's particular strengths show up in all of these books. We know in each book that there will be strenuous adventures where nature is both beautiful and dangerous. We're in a blizzard, lost in woods, climbing mountains, being tracked by a wounded cougar, or sneaking across a lake to an enemy's fortified estate. Krueger also has a gift for making us feel the vulnerability of adolescents. Besides Cork's children and Solemn Winter Moon, there are the friends Ren, Charlene ("Charlie"), and Stash in Copper River, a musician named Ulysses ("Uly") in Red Knife who has lost his older brother to gang violence, and, in Vermilion Drift, flashbacks to young Cork himself, in conflict with his father.
I'm eager to catch up to Krueger through the next ten books! ←← | ← || → Use the arrows to follow the entire series in sequence.
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