A man hires part-time detective Cork O'Connor to find his beautiful wife Dolores who ran off with a lover. So far, so noir, author William Kent Krueger channeling Chandler. It's so classic, it's a stereotype. Then we learn the identity of The Other Man. I laughed out loud.
Still, Fox Creek is full of suspense, ordeals, and moral dilemmas. As Krueger himself notes in an interview at the back of my signed hardback edition, beloved characters of the series have suffered and died. Because we can't assume they'll be okay, he can generate some genuine suspense.
But among the great joys of this series is the building up of community around Cork. His friends and family are all involved in the search for Dolores, even after Cork's wife Rainy and mentor Henry Meloux become targets. His son Stephen, whom longtime fans remember as a vulnerable little boy, now shares with his father the responsibility of being an action hero. It's a delight to see Stephen fall in love with a suitably courageous and smart woman named Belle who seems to feel the same about him.
We find another joy on the border between standard detective novel and wilderness adventure, as the action crosses from Cork's small Minnesota town into Canada.
As always, Krueger also explores the boundary between the material world and spirituality, whether that's Ojibwe or Christian. Stephen's vision and the wisdom of Henry figure in the story.
While Henry leads Dolores and Rainy through woods he's known 100 years, he misleads a tribal hunter working for the bad guys. Through the hunt, Henry and the hunter known as LeLoux ("the Wolf") come to respect each other. Their relationship becomes the heart of the novel long before they ever meet.
The book before that is Lightning Strike, set in the summer of Cork's 12th year. With two buddies, he discovers the body of a revered Indian man hanging in a secluded spot where the friends like to camp and canoe. Cork's father Liam, the town's sheriff, investigates. The death at first seems to be a suicide, then a murder staged to look like suicide. The victim's Indian half-brother is implicated, but so is the town's white millionaire. No matter which way the evidence takes Liam, he's making enemies.
To see the father-son relationship with Cork in the child's place is instantly rich with resonances to the other books and rewarding. Many of my favorite moments happen when Cork slips out of his bedroom onto the roof of the porch where he can think -- and sometimes hear his parents' low voices when they discuss the crime and their parenting of him.
While the setting is 1963, the novel resonates with the upheaval and uncertainty of the year of its copyright, 2020. Liam is a white cop, married to an Ojibwe woman, hearing anger and mistrust from both the reservation and the white townspeople. Young Cork feels afraid: "The world seemed to be changing in front of his eyes, and he couldn't figure out if it was him -- that he'd simply been blind before -- or if the world was, indeed, shifting, becoming unstable under his feet" (207). Later, he confesses to his mom, "Everthing's different. It all feels broken. Here and on the rez" (271). I know that feeling. His mother has no answers.
Henry Meloux does. 50 years before he's the elder we know, he's already wise. "Nothing is broken," he tells young Cork. "It is just that we see only in part" (272). Again, "Fear is not a bad thing in itself....It is what we do with our fear that matters."
Cork does some investigation on his own, and takes his buddies out to the wilderness to snoop around. The action ramps up fast.
There's a theme of empathy, here. Cork imagines the last minutes in the life of a tribal girl who drowned and understands in a flash of insight what really happened. He feels it deeply: "She'd been just a victim before. Now, she was a person and Cork felt a genuine sorrow, one he wanted to talk about but could not" (350). Liam is chagrined to see himself as his son must see him. "Even to himself he looked like a stranger, a man who could frighten children" (256). He goes to talk to his son, but Cork's asleep, and the father keeps his feelings to himself.
No spoiler alert, needed, here: Longtime fans know from the 10th book Vermilion Drift that Liam O'Connor will die estranged from his son later that summer. That subtext adds emotional substance to the entire novel.
[Find a list of links to my appreciations of other Krueger novels on my Crime Fiction page]
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