Books 14 and 15 in the Cork O'Connor Series: Deep "Canyon"

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For books 14 and 15 of the series featuring detective Cork O'Connor, author William Kent Krueger dreamed up two of his most memorable openings. These two books also give us two halves of one arc in a crisis for the hero Cork, whose loved ones observe to each other that he has lost something essential. The friends and family who support him through his trouble grow both in number and in depth.

Windigo Island Readers of the series know from Ojibwe tradition that the cannibal spirit called a "windigo" will call the name of its next victim in the wind, and that the only way to defeat a windigo is to become one.

This novel opens with Native boys in their early teens who canoe to Windigo Island for a daring stunt. As a long-time middle school teacher, I can attest to Krueger's accuracy and sympathy depicting this age: we're fully on the boys' side when the weather turns suddenly and the wind calls out one name. Then they see the creature.

Chapter two involves the detective and his grown daughter Jenny in the search for two missing Native girls in their teens. As the trail leads quickly into the business of child trafficking led by a brute named Windigo, Cork's anger grows until, some chapters later, he is becoming what he opposes. Cork gave up firearms earlier in the series, but here he aims a gun at a man's old dog. A new character, Daniel English, tells Jenny, "Something [in Cork] died there." It's a relief that Krueger shifts away from Cork to tell the story through Jenny's perceptions.

Krueger alludes many times to a tribal adage, that two wolves battle inside all of us, Love and Fear: the one we feed will win. In Windigo Island, there's a lot to fear -- powerful men with guns, flame, explosions -- but the fear of disappointing a loved one is strongest.

Manitou Canyon Krueger frontloads this story with foreboding. A band of Natives, including a woman, a tall man, and a teenaged boy with a rifle encamp above a secluded lake. The boy learns that the name of his target is Cork O'Connor. He sights the shoreline, and the woman behind him whispers "Bang."

In the pages that follow, Krueger sets Cork on a hunt for a millionaire engineer, once Cork's friend in childhood, missing from a fishing trip on that same lake.

Visions, important to the Ojibwe traditions of Cork's family, deepen the dread. Cork's memories of failures and fatalities in Novembers of other years make this November "cruelest" month. His loved ones sense that he has changed. His son Stephen comes home early from a vision quest because he has such a strong sense of danger enveloping his father. And a new character, Leah, still angry after five decades that the Ojibwe healer Henry Meloux rejected her, now comes to him for help, terrified from her waking dream: hundreds of fish with human faces, gasping, drowning. 

Stephen and Cork come to recognitions about their roles in life as healer and guardian, respectively.

While this novel goes to dark places, there are buds of hope along the way that open as in time-lapse photography to make this novel a bouquet of reconciliation and gratitude. How many detective novels have ever left me feeling that way? I can't think of one.

[See my responses to other Krueger books]

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