Detective Cork O'Connor & Family: "Northwest Angle" and "Trickster's Point"

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I'm catching up with author William Kent Krueger. I've written about books 1-10 in his series of novels featuring detective Corcoran "Cork" O'Connor [see Still Growing (07/2022).] Now I've enjoyed books 11 and 12.

Book 11: Northwest Angle

Before there's even a crime, Northwest Angle involves us deeply in Krueger's favorite themes of family, spirituality, and nature. Cork has brought his children, their Aunt Rose, and her husband Mal to a houseboat on a lake, beautiful and remote.

It's not just a vacation. Cork's eldest daughter Jenny is expected to become engaged to a man Cork doesn't trust. Before the suitor joins the party, Cork takes Jenny to the secluded island where, in his teens, he had his vision quest. Rock drawings there represent the importance of children to the tribe. She gets the message that he wants her to consider her future more carefully, and she resents it.

That's when a strong fast-moving windstorm called a derecho separates everyone. Jenny finds shelter in a lone cabin where, inside, an infant boy cries, a woman lies dead, and the rooms have been ransacked. Jenny realizes that the killer, who must have been looking for something particular, is likely nearby. From then on, the baby is in Jenny's care.

Just the adventure of Jenny and Cork finding each other and evading a stalker, while shielding the child, makes a satisfying story in itself.

But then there's the murder investigation. There's an emotional surprise when our perception of a certain character flips 180 degrees, and there's a contest of spiritual strength -- both harrowing and hilarious -- between the vicious matriarch of a hateful Christian sect and Cork's mentor Henry Meloux with his Ojibwe traditions. Then there's Jenny's decision.

A rich read for a detective novel? Just the rich read I've come to expect from Krueger.

Book 12: Trickster's Point In the first pages of Trickster's Point, we read about two events decades apart that set the poles for this novel. Everything derives from these events.

First, at age 60, Cork watches his old friend Jubal Little die slowly from an arrow to the heart, evidently one from Cork's own quiver. Jubal is a politician, and was expected to become the first indigenous governor of Minnesota. It happens at Trickster's Point, an island with a rock formation hundreds of feet high, where they'd hunted many times since high school. Naturally, Cork is prime suspect.

The other is a memory from sixth grade of how Cork first met Jubal. Cork was with his friend Willie Crane, a kind boy hindered in gait and speech by cerebral palsy, and Willie's sister Winona, Cork's secret crush. A notorious bully, Donner Bigby, with his entourage, comes up to mock Willie, and Cork considers what to do:

As the son of the Tamarack County sheriff, Cork felt on his shoulders the onerous weight of doing the right thing. Which meant taking on Donner Bigby who was a head taller and thirty or forty pounds heavier and who probably knew more about how to beat the living crap out of a kid than anyone Cork could think of. He considered simply trying to talk his way past Bigby, and hustling Willie and Winona along with him. (12)

But then Winona punches Donner. Young Cork is struggling when a stranger, Jubal, comes up from behind, puts Donner in a headlock, and orders the entourage away "or I'll break his neck."

It's the beginning of a beautiful friendship, but there's trouble. Jubal develops a relationship with Winona over the years that wise man Henry Meloux describes as "two halves of a broken stone," marked by a pattern of crackups and reconciliations. Jubal and Cork remain close friends through their years together on the high school football team, but then, Cork explains, "He grew into someone else, the man he always believed he was meant to be, a guy destined for something great. And greatness takes up a lot of space" (181).

While a hostile state official directs the investigation of Cork by his old police friends, Cork tracks down leads among old classmates, all related to that seminal boyhood incident.

On this track between past and present, themes emerge. There's that theme of the effect that "greatness" has on relationships. There are a lot of confessions, not least of which is Jubal's admission to Cork, "I envied you" (181). And nearly every male character is struggling for the approval of his father, even years after the parent's death (207).

Along these lines, Krueger continues to develop Cork's relationship to his son Stephen. With mentoring from the old wise man Henry, Stephen is becoming a healer. In conversation about why a shooter aimed at Cork, Stephen hears Cork say the man was "protecting someone he loves." Stephen picks up the theme:

That's the point. Someone he loves...[S]omeone was ready to kill you, but that doesn't seem to matter to you. You just keep doing what you do. And me and Jenny, we're just sitting around waiting for the time we get a call and some stupid voice on the other end of the line tells us you're dead. (293)

The scene ends in tears - Cork's, Stephen's, mine.

I'll confess that I've already forgotten who did it or why. It seemed sensible to me at the time I read it a couple of weeks ago. But I'll remember the relationships and how it felt to be in Cork's world.

[See my responses to other Krueger books]

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London Homecoming

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Scott Smoot and his bike at Trafalgar Square, virtually

After the Queen's funeral last Monday, I took some time away from the bike. I got back in the saddle this weekend with two rides, 56 miles, enough to take me from Oxford to London on my virtual tour of the world. In the selfie, I'm resting my other arm on the seat of my bike while I rest myself in Trafalgar Square.

This is a place I lived and loved in my imagination long before I first visited in 1980. From Mary Poppins in grade school to practically all the dead white guys I read for my English major, my memory was packed with London images and incidents, so much so that I burst into tears coming up from the Marble Arch station, as if it were a homecoming, not my first step on a London street.

On great advice from my mentor Frank Boggs, I first toured London's National Portrait Gallery. From the top floor where I saw Alfred the Great's crude likeness on a ship's plank, to the basement, where I recognized Henry James from across the room, I strolled through a thousand years.

In a room dedicated to massive framed portraits of 18th century writers, I found my favorite portrait on the back of an envelope. From several feet away, I saw the sketch of a gentleman with a hunched back and bowed legs disproportionately short, and knew that it must be the refined but feisty poet Alexander Pope. He fought to have no likeness made of what he called his "misshapen" body. Portrait artist Joshua Reynolds drew him surreptitiously while the poet gestured in conversation. I was amused and touched.

During six weeks of studying literature at Oxford, I reserved weekends for London theatre. I saw first London productions by some of my heroes that summer: Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd, Harold Pinter's The Hothouse, and, my favorite of the summer, Peter Shaffer's Amadeus, much more fun than the movie. Another highlight was a Samuel Beckett double-bill at the Old Vic theatre, Krapp's Last Tape and Endgame, the author directing inmates from San Quentin.

I had London all to myself at sunrise on my last day in England. Walking to Paddington, I sang "London Pride," learned from a recording by Cleo Laine. Noel Coward's wartime benediction for the city expressed what I was feeling:

Gray city,
stubbornly implanted,
taken so for granted
for a thousand years.

Stay, city,
smokily enchanted,
cradle of our memories,
our hopes and fears.

Every blitz,
our resistance toughens
from the Ritz
to the Anchor and Crown.
Nothing ever can override
the pride of London town.

←← | ← || → Use the arrows to trace the entire tour from the beginning.

Remembering Terry Strecker

Terry Strecker, C; as Santa with Scott Smoot; w/ Kitty, grandson, and Goofy

At Holy Trinity Episcopal Church in West Palm Beach September 10, those in attendance heard tributes to Terry Strecker from his grown son Andrew Strecker and from Carole Drew, sister of Terry's wife, my friend and longtime colleague Kitty Drew.

We heard how Kitty had calmed Andrew's nerves, telling him, "Don't worry about trying to be clever, or funny, or deep -- just be yourself." Big laugh. Then Andrew was clever, funny, and deep, taking us through his perspective on his father. Andrew made sure that we knew how Terry lived out a favorite quote from Johnny Cash: "All your life, you can choose love or hate. I choose love."

Like Andrew, Carole recalled Terry's gruff side, but left us with memories of his great generosity to everyone and great love for his own family.

The Rev. R-J Heijmen told us that Terry had bypassed the usual Gospel readings recommended for the occasion in favor of Luke 10.25-37, the parable of the Good Samaritan. "Terry lived that story," the priest said.

My own memories are mostly from social situations, as he and Kitty frequently hosted get-togethers at their own home or at a local wine bar. For my sake, he steered clear of sports to involve me in conversation about some of the things he knew I loved: great singers, literature, and martinis. I treasure the metallic martini chalice he gave me, unbreakable and always chilled.

He and I both had been drama teachers. He loved that work, but traded it for a business career to provide more for his family. With Kitty, we saw professional shows and dissected them. After Kitty's sixth graders performed in her annual "wax museum," the three of us would meet at a restaurant to compare notes. Terry could get very enthusiastic about those who cared about what they were doing, and pretty pointed skewering those few who blew off the project. He took me out for drinks after many performances by my own students and was always discerning in his appreciation.

Gruff as he was, Terry's tender side is what I remember best. I remember Terry at a party, crying as he talked about his old dog. He cared for his parents and parents-in-law through their old age. He also got to know my parents, who, like him, had graduated from Walnut Hills High, a unique public school they all loved, with its top-notch college prep program and tradition of diversity. Mom and Dad graduated in 1954; Terry was class of '64. When my dad died, Terry and Kitty drove the hours down to Valdosta for the memorial.

So I could not miss driving down for his. I'll miss you, Terry. Love to Kitty.

What Put the "Dead" in the Dead Sea?

Our rector Fr. Roger Allen elaborated the parable of The Rich Man and Lazarus by making another parable from the Dead Sea. He detailed just how lifeless it is, even though a huge quantity of fresh water pours into the lake every day. "Life-giving water pours in," he explained, "but just evaporates away, leaving behind mineral residue -- because the lake has no outlet." Perfect image for anyone who takes without giving, whether it's the material wealth that we all have -- "if you have more than one pair of shoes and you eat more than once a day, you're rich by the world's standards" -- or it's love given to us, we're the Dead Sea if we don't get out of ourselves on behalf of others.

This sermon was a companion to last week's exploration of the difficult parable of the Crooked Manager. Though the manager in the story is fired for skimming his employer's funds, the employer ends the story commending the manager for shrewdness in reducing what debtors owe to his ex-employer. "Using what he had at his disposal," Fr. Roger said, "he was creative: he made friends and ensured a future for himself." Fr. Roger also cited the creativity of the men in Luke 5 who lowered their paralyzed friend through the roof of a crowded home to reach Jesus. Likewise, Fr. Roger advised us all, "Use what you have, use it now, and use it for something eternal."

Oxford Revisited

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Scott Smoot at New College, Oxford, virtually

Since September 13, I've biked 223 miles on bike trails around Atlanta. On the map of my virtual tour of the world, that distance takes me from Dublin to Oxford. In the photo, I'm riding past the campus of New College -- "new" because it was founded so recently, in 1379.

I lived there during the summer of 1980 in a "new" dorm, built around the time of America's Civil War. Below is a photo I took from my room. Across the way is a segment of the old city wall, one of the oldest structures in the city.

There to study works by Woolf, Beckett, Joyce, Lawrence, Eliot, and Yeats, I put my heart into it. My classmates -- like me, A.B. Duke scholars from Duke University -- met once every week in small seminar groups and twice with a tutor. The tutorial sessions were much more intense. Fellow student Chichi and I took turns presenting papers aloud for our "tute." We had to defend our ideas with evidence from the text. It was good training for the work I would do on Henry James that year. But maybe it backfired: I declined my nomination for a Rhodes scholarship. Dad couldn't believe I refused the offer, but my feeling was, been there, done that.

Some highlights and firsts:

• My first experience of social drinking: sherry with classmates and teachers
• The song of a lark that told me I'd worked through the first all-nighter of my school career -- and the last
• A run on trails around town that I thought was two miles, but was really eight. My running companion Tom Robey concealed the truth until the end. There's a lesson about expectations and endurance -- and ignorance.
• Research at the Bodleian Library, where the earliest librarian wore a suit of armor for his official portrait. Its outstanding building "the Radcliffe Camera" is a family heirloom. So said my grandmother, Harriet Radcliffe Smoot.
• Virginia Woolf's fiction didn't do much for me -- except the last gesture in To the Lighthouse -- but her personal essays introduced me to a genre that would become central to my teaching and, since I started this blog, central to my life.

←← | ← || → Use the arrows to follow the tour from the start.

Prep Kid in a Factory: What a Multi-Cultural Experience Gave Me

Race by itself is not a culture. Race was, however, a starting place for me in my teens to see limits of my own cultural experience. The gateway was Dad's chemical factory near downtown Atlanta, where I worked summers during high school and college.

Before then, I was a child in the suburbs of midwestern cities -- Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Chicago. Mom and Dad taught the word prejudice and said it was bad, but I got a different message from my experience, as I wrote recently in a poem, "Behind Prejudice" (from my online collection First Verse)

The few black men I ever saw
in my childhood were these:

men behind counters, mops, or mowers
in aprons or dungarees;

in darkness behind the gaping windows
where, driving, we locked our doors;

on TV, muscles gleaming behind
white coaches or explorers;

Cosby and Satchmo, behind wide smiles,
their comic drawls and whoops;

behind beleagured Doctor King,
men hurling bricks at cops.

So when a dred-locked thickset man
in shorts behind a stroller

grinned to see, toddling ahead,
his giggling little daughter,

behind what segregation taught me--
like bulls, they're docile or mad--

I confess I felt surprise that he
was just like a regular dad.

I first worked alongside black men in 8th grade when my father started his business and paid me by the hour. I worked mostly in the air-conditioned lab, but many times I was in the heat and humidity outback with black men Henry, Leroy, Zion, and others. The jobs involved heavy lifting, teamwork, 100-pound bags of powders that choked you if you breathed them, and 55-gallon drums of caustic liquids that burned when you touched them or breathed their fumes. We wore boots to walk slippery ground, rubber gloves, sometimes goggles and masks. When the work wasn't dangerous, it was tedious: to fill and cap hundreds of bottles, paste on labels, and box them up for shipping.

The men tuned the radio to R&B stations, so just a few seconds of anything by Al Green or The Stylistics takes me back to those days. I enjoyed the banter between the men, though I didn't understand much of it.

I worked mostly with Henry, a burly bearded man. I probably was in the way, but he always made me feel like he needed my help, and he hovered close to protect "Doc" Smoot's boy. So I was shocked when Dad told me Henry had done time for killing his co-worker at a previous job. "It's ok," Dad said. "The guy came at him with a knife." But I understood that all of the men had spent time in jail before Dad hired them, and sometimes Dad left work on a Monday to bail someone out.

I most admired Leroy, a veteran, straight-backed, broad-shouldered, soft-spoken. When he brought samples to me for testing in the lab, he stood "at ease," head up, feet apart, hands joined at the small of his back. I'd hand him the result, and he'd go back out into the heat. One time he paused at the door to say that he and the guys were all wondering, why did I add a little cross to the number 7? That's how Europeans do it, I said. Suddenly, I saw myself as this prep boy with affectations from book-learning.

After college and a year of teaching at a prep school, I visited Dad at work. He said the men were on lunch break and that they asked about me all the time. I found them playing checkers like I'd never seen it before, one move following the other, rapid-fire. Later, from memory, I sketched the scene.

(L-R) Zion, Leroy, and Henry, sketched from memory the day I last saw them, August 1982

Dad pinned the group portrait to the bulletin board. That's old Zion standing, by that time too rickety and blind to do much work, but Dad kept him on for the sake of the family Zion supported. There's Leroy. When he died a couple of years later, Dad made sure he got the full military honors that he deserved -- Leroy's daughter was stunned and grateful. And there's Henry, scowling at red powder scum on his fingers. That was my thank-you.

Through these workers, I got my first sense of life on the other side of town, of the kindness and family concerns of men whom I might have otherwise perceived as threatening, and a strong sense of my being sheltered from financial insecurity and from work so strenuous and sticky.

That's something I've carried with me to college and beyond. Other men my age never had such an experience. Once, I convinced Dad to give a week's work to a prep school friend of mine who wanted to earn some extra cash, but the guy lasted only one day. When I sometimes described my factory work to my middle school students, they'd ask, wasn't that child abuse? To them, hard physical labor is inherently demeaning.

I hated it at the time, but now, for that work, and for those workers, I feel only gratitude.

[Written in response to a prompt from the program Education for Ministry: "Share experience(s) with other cultures that have contributed to your sense of self." See my EfM class blog. For a related blogpost, see The Privilege is Mine]

The Team that Helped my Dog Find Home

My favorite part of Episcopal morning prayer is the Great Thanksgiving at the end. I go to my dog Brandy, invariably curled up on the sofa, and pet her while I say the prayer by memory, including these words, "We bless You [Father] for our creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life," thinking preserve this creature; she is a blessing. Yesterday morning, I was forlorn when I got to that part, because Brandy had been missing 36 hours.

A few hours later, she found home. I'm reflecting on the team of people who helped Brandy to reach that happy ending.

Professional dog sitters Diane and Renee had taken turns caring for Brandy while I was out of town. Visiting on Saturday evening, Renee challenged "a random guy" walking up my driveway who claimed he got lost in woods behind my home. That was plausible; there was a party nearby, and alcohol may have been involved. Renee spent quality time with Brandy and left. There was no reason to think that the man had climbed the privacy fence and opened the gate from inside. The next morning, when Brandy was missing, Renee descended to Brandy's playground where she found the gate ajar.

After Diane and Renee contacted me, they posted "LOST" signs all over the area. They posted her photo online. They put on boots and long pants to search the woods for signs of Brandy. On my front porch they put out Brandy's bed with water and food in case she came back when no one was home. When I arrived, we hoped my voice would draw Brandy out of hiding.

Phone tips indicated that Brandy had cut through the woods to the main road, one leg of a circuit she and I walk often. Because cars speed by on that road every minute, I always tell Brandy, "Look both ways." She does; we wait for any cars to pass, then trot across. I've always hoped, if Brandy ever got away, that she would follow that circuit all the way home.

Saturday, she evidently was doing just that when she ducked under the guard rail to follow her nose into another neighborhood.

Diane, Renee and I searched the woods behind homes where she had been sighted. Diane kept encouraging us with happy scenarios she imagined. She fearlessly rapped on doors, even in the sketchy compound of five homes where people seem to be raising chickens and growing something illegal. Diane's husband Dave brought us water and sandwiches -- talk about preservation and blessing! I hadn't eaten all day -- and we searched nearly to dinnertime.

David and Diane

After worrying through a rainy night, I cut short my morning routine. Donning shoes without Brandy's eager anticipation of the day, going to the kitchen without her running ahead, putting food out for the squirrels without Brandy snatching up the stray peanut -- these just made me sad. I skipped everything else to search instead.

An early search turned out to be a great idea. I left my car parked with a "LOST" poster in the window. Parents and kids passing by me on their ways to work or school saw the leash and empty collar as I called her name. I was a walking advertisement, and that paid off a little later.

Discouraged after nearly two hours, I was heading back to my car, planning to search the county dog pound, when a young woman in a car stopped to take me where she had seen Brandy not half an hour earlier.

Now I knew that Brandy was still in the vicinity, great news. But the woman had seen Brandy run southeast. Two blocks east was the familiar two lane road and our neighborhood; but two blocks south was a busy six lane highway.

I received three calls in rapid succession. Brandy had exited the subdivision; she had re-crossed the two-lane road; she was trotting along the right side of the road going north, the direction of our neighborhood. I texted the news to Diane. Far from my car, I was running -- not my forte -- when the best tip of all came from a man whose property Brandy has watered many many times. She'd gone through his yard towards our street.

I called her name from the top of the cul-de-sac where we live at the bottom of the hill and she came out into the yard, ears perked. She ran to me, tail between her legs -- happy but sheepish? -- and Diane arrived with food.

Diane served Brandy her first meal, moments after recovery.

Diane did two things I wouldn't have thought to do. First, she took us to a DIY pet grooming salon for a bath. Brandy had somehow spent the night in the woods during a storm without getting wet or dirty, but Diane knew that mites and poison ivy oils might be in that fur. Then Diane set up an appointment for the vet to check Brandy for dehydration and any signs of injury. Renee, overwhelmed with joy and unable to speak when Brandy showed up, dropped in at the vet's to welcome Brandy back. The vet discovered that Brandy does indeed have an abrasion on one paw, now being treated with an ointment.

I'm glad that I took some time to send photos of the happy homecoming to the people who contacted me with tips. Many wanted more details; one person wrote that now her six-year-old was relieved, and another wrote, "You've made my wife's day!"

From them all, I've learned to snap a photo of LOST posters when I see them, so that I'll have the number handy if I can report a sighting.

• See my page Loving Dogs for links to articles about Brandy, with pictures, along with articles about other dogs in literature and in my life.
• Accessible Poem (for Brandy) is my poem about one of Brandy's endearing peculiarities, finished the day Brandy was almost lost to me.

Diane filmed these first minutes after Brandy's homecoming.

Brandy's Aunt Susan brought a peanut-butter filled bone.

Poems from August

Every weekday morning for an hour, I descend to my basement workroom to read ten minutes of poetry by someone wonderful (lately, Derek Walcott) and then work to write a poem of my own. My dog Brandy settles into the poofy chair opposite me. Since July, I've managed to write two poems down there, adding them to my poetry blog First Verse.

By coincidence, the poem about Brandy was completed in the morning of the day she got out of the yard. (An intruder had forced the gate open while I was away.) Brandy survived 40 hours in the woods of a nearby subdivision before she found her way back home.

Accessible Poem (for Brandy)

I know my dog some day won't somersault.
For now, she stretches brandy-colored limbs
to the seat of a plush chair and hops to the center.
She kneads the cushion as if she's digging for bones;
her claws rake the linen zip-zip-zip.
She lowers her brandy face between her paws,
her body now a sleek black slope
from feathery tail to velvety upturned bat-ears.
Her eyes, glinting coffee black, find mine.
She yaps, as if to say, "Hey! Watch this!"
She tucks her chin beneath, flips belly up,
then kicks the air, and stops. Again, she kicks.
Breathing hard, she rolls to one side, at rest.
May she, by these lines, always be accessed.

Here's Brandy photographed by her professional dog sitters Diane and Renee.

On his birthdays, John Updike wrote sonnets to take stock of his inner and outer worlds. I emulated him on my birthday in July. But the form didn't fit the content; it needed something lighter, more like the rhyme-studded songs that Astaire made famous.

At 63

The neighbors up early might see Fred Astaire
by my kitchen sink tapping the spout to prepare
Mister Coffee. That set, he pirouettes
with plates he deals like cards, jetés
with kibble for the dog, then glides in the dark
to the deck where he stretches bird feed to its hook.

I pour the coffee and open my prayer book.
Later, the rounds of the market, the park,
the church, the Home to sing Mom Sinatra.
First, I read this morning mantra:
In You we move and have our being.
They think it's a lonely old dancer they're seeing.

Cyclin' to Dublin

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Scott Smoot at Dublin, Joyce's martello tower -- virtually

From Iceland to Ireland is a difference of one letter and 884 miles, Reykjavik to Dublin. I've biked those miles on trails around Atlanta since August 2. Now I pause to pose with a backdrop of old Dublin from atop a "martello" tower, one of many built to defend British territory from Napoleon.

Since my only time in Ireland was an hour in Shannon Airport, how can Dublin belong to my virtual tour of "places I've lived or loved?" I have two reasons: James Joyce and DNA.

What I love is the opening chapter of Ulysses. James Joyce begins his novel at this very tower after sunrise on June 16, 1904, as a covey of young men boarding there are variously cooking sausage, shaving, or sleeping in, full of literature and themselves. One of these is Stephen Dedalus. The novel follows him and his friend Leopold Bloom through this one day.

So I hear; I never finished reading the book. I used to try to read it every June 16, the day called "Bloom's Day" by fans worldwide who celebrate with staged readings of the entire novel. Chapter one was more a delight every time, but I've always bogged down before chapter 10. Finally, I just skipped to the last page (it's a good one!), wrote about what I appreciated, and put the book away. See Happy Bloom's Day (06/16/2007).

I also claim Ireland for my ancestral home. When I told my Aunt Harriet that Thomas Cahill's book How the Irish Saved Civilization (1995) made me wish I were Irish, she quipped, "Silly! You are Irish." She would know. In 1967, her Aunt Lucille Smoot's family history came to my dad from their father Dewey Smoot with this note: "This is not a complete history but maybe... it [can] satisfy your children. As for me, I couldn't care less in re: such matters." I'm with him; I'll take Aunt Harriet's word. [Family Corner tells more about the family.]

←← | ← || →Use the arrows to follow the tour from the beinning

Impudent but not Irreverent: Mary Karr's Less Holy Bible

"The Less Holy Bible" comprises 20 poems set apart from others in Mary Karr's collection Tropic of Squalor (2018). "Less Holy" is what we expect from Karr, whose memoirs of addiction and affairs earned her a reputation for being a "black belt sinner." When she tells The On Being Project that she's "a real church lady" who reads scripture every day, she herself seems a little surprised. These poems, she says, are her personal responses to particular books of the Bible. While she gleefully skewers authorities, ex-lovers, and herself in these poems, she's never less than serious about our potential to cause pain and find grace.

My favorite is called "Revelation," a natural choice for the final book of this bible. Subtitled "A Messenger," the poem begins, "It was anybody's son at the door." Already we have sympathy for the bike messenger in a green slicker who plowed through heavy rain to bring her the contract for a lucrative job. She invites him to step inside while she handles the papers, and we get to know him, his hopes and his obstacles. As he rides off "green wings extended / behind in the wind," she reveals his appropriate name and prays to be "rich again," thinking not of the money but of how this encounter has enriched her. Us, too.

Connecting content to the Biblical names is fun. While psalms in the Bible are words set to music, "Psalms: Carnegie Hall Rush Seats" sets musical ecstasy to words. Obadiah's litany of disasters inspires "Obadiah: A Perfect Mess," about a confluence of pedestrians packing the sidewalk, men moving a piano, and a downpour -- apparent disaster mitigated by kindness. The sorry descendants of David in Kings I and II inspire an imprecation on political shysters that she calls "The Obscenity Prayer," modeled on the Lord's prayer ("And empower our asses / that they destroy those / who ass against us").

Karr is playful even when her subjects are grim. "We live on a scab," Karr writes in the first poem, "Genesis: Animal Planet" about her own genesis in a town settled uneasily over petrochemical toxins and the goo left by prehistoric life. The numbers in "Numbers" are statistics from her hometown's cancer epidemic, blithely ignored by executives whose polluting factory is the cause. "Exodus" recalls the inner voice that told her "run, you little bitch." A neighbor in New York who molests children is subject of a poem she calls "Ecclesiastes," perhaps because she's thinking, as the Bible book says, there is a time to kill. "Hebrews" and "Lamentations" concern Holocaust survivors and 9/11.

The title of one particularly intense poem is a bitter joke. As the names of gospel writers Mark and John are slang terms for "victim" and "sexual predator," Karr gives us "Marks and Johns: The Blessed Mother Complains to the Lord Her God about the Abundance of Brokenness She Receives." When the title gives away so much, who needs the poem? But as the voice of St. Mary recounts the self-harm, scars, and losses suffered by desperate people who kneel at her altar, she has a vision of each one as "a cross my son is nailed to." It's a twist that helps us to see the Crucifixion in a new way.

"I try to see God in everything," Karr told On Being, a practice she carries on in the stand-alone poems of Tropic of Squalor, too. Some concern God's working within a person to break them out of stifling or harmful self-concern. They don't always make it, like the daughter whose parents' love can't keep her from harming herself ("The Burning Girl"). Karr indicts probably her entire readership who live in a "city of I-beams and mirrored towers," heads bent over phones in the line at Whole Foods, oblivious to the whole world's wonders within their reach ("Discomfort Food for the Unwhole"). But there's also Karr's appreciating her difficult father's appetite for life unmediated by literature ("Illiterate Progenitor"). And Karr's memory of playing basketball with fellow inmates of a rehab center includes a miracle from which she takes the inspiration to want to live again ("Loony Bin Basketball").

I'm keeping this Less Holy Bible on the shelf within easy reach of the other one.

• I discuss two more selections from the Less Holy Bible in Poets on Prayer (01/2022)
• I appreciate Karr's collection Sinners Welcome (2006) in Discomfort and Joy (06/2020).
• A piece of Karr's essay relating poetry to prayer kicks off Where Prayer Meets Poetry: the Collect (05/2020), about an Anglican specialty.
• Mary Karr's poem "Etchings from the Plague Years" (1993) was my introduction to her work. My seminar group considered it in a theological reflection. See Vocation and Plague at our class blog, the second half of the article.
• Watch Karr and others in a forum arranged by On Being with the Episcopal National Cathedral

Theology for Breakfast: "Forward Day by Day" May-June-July 2022

Every morning I read the day's meditation on scripture in Forward Day by Day, and I've culled highlights every quarter going back to 2013.

May: Cowboy Gospel Through marriage, Rex Peterson has adopted the life of a cowboy. His meditations borrow from experiences on his wife's ranch in Nebraska, and sometimes play against our notions of home on the range:

• Psalm 28.11 makes him wonder if we're like the sheep who daily experience his tender care, yet flee from him when he approaches.
• To understand the importance of the blood of the covenant in Exodus 24.8, we should experience what it's like to slaughter a lamb; it "makes us squirm" to read about it and it's nothing like the neat white packages of meat we get at the butcher's.
• "Blessed are the righteous" (Mt. 5.6) moves Peterson to question the image of the righteous lone cowboy, as most ranch work is done in teams. Righteousness is not about being right, he tells us, but "working with others so that all succeed."
• A lesson about fertilizer enhances the lines about "lilies of the field" (Mt.6.28), as he demonstrates that "scarce is enough."
• Finally, he gives us the welcome scene of young lambs' first vaccination. It's traumatic for them, but their mothers are there at the end of the process for a joyful reunion. Peterson relates the lambs to the apostles at Ascension Day: "Only when reunited did [the suffering] make sense."

Reading Psalm 38.10, "The brightness of eyes is gone from me," Peterson responds with the story of his son's horrific experience in Iraq. The soldier came back "angry, anxious, a shell of himself." Peterson offers no resolution to this story.

Comforted by the notion that God's forgiveness is based not on earning forgiveness but on being the one who forgives, Peterson asks a question that might illuminate a relationship: Is it harder for you to apologize or to forgive?

June: Silence and Communication Priest Brendan O'Sullivan-Hale, who lives in Indianapolis with his husband and "an undisclosed number of cats," finds a lot to write about on what's expressed, and what's left unexpressed:

• Psalm 56.8 expresses grief such as he felt when his mother died. No one tried to talk him out of it. While he just "went through the motions" of faith, the church "believed on my behalf," he writes, until he could re-connect to our God "so intimately connected with sorrow."
• When reconciliation seems impossible, don't talk about the cause of disagreement, at least not until you've acknowledged that none of us does better than to "see through a glass darkly"
• Between the lines of Compline, the prayer book's bedtime service, O'Sulivan-Hale sees prayers and readings that prepare us for death. The Song of Simeon especially shows gratitude at the end of life.
• Nostalgia for Egypt in Numbers 11.4-5 moves the writer to allow that it's not a bad thing to be "nourished" by good memories while the bad ones "lose their power." He adds, "anticipation" is "nostalgia's productive cousin."
• Why say "I love you" or speak praise to God when it's all been said before? We need to say it to "recalibrate" the relationship to a loved one, and to God.
• The inability to comprehend God is a theme in Job, and Paul admits that he has to use metaphors and analogies "in human terms" to explain God (Romans 6.19). Our writer says, that's what Jesus does for us: beyond words, he expresses our relationship with God in human terms.
• Good advice when worries keep you up at night: Instead of expressing all your worries, pray for all the people you can think of who are up working at the same hour. [I wrote from gratitude for Those Who Work or Watch This Night (01/2020) and a few days later I did indeed create a prayer service for the sleepless, Can't Sleep? Pray This.]

If I one day forget what the time of pandemic was like, this writer gets it on a visceral, personal level in a meditation on Romans 2.1, "In passing judgment on another, you condemn yourself." O'Sullivan-Hale writes that he thinks of himself as non-judgmental, but COVID "unleashed a wave of judgment in my life." For example,

I judged people wearing masks incorrectly at the grocery store. I judged people eating in restaurants. I judged churches that put too little effort into online worship and those that put in too much. I judged people who kept wiping down surfaces constantly even after the science showed surfaces were a low risk for transmission. And I know for a fact people were judging me too. [The] cycle of recriminations is exhausting and emotionally draining. God desires that we choose a different way.

Finally, the writer draws our attention to a detail in Matthew 21.6-7 where there was probably something lost in translation from an ancient prophecy. To prepare Jesus's entry to Jerusalem, disciples put a single blanket over the flanks of both a colt and a donkey. A medieval rendition of the scene has Jesus awkwardly riding side-saddle, and still one of the animals has to be drawn disproportionately small to make it work. So? For O'Sullivan-Hale, the oddness of it unlocks imagination -- I would say, like a good image in poetry -- and brings the Scripture to new life for an open-minded reader.

July: Lectionary Connections Eva Suarez, Associate Rector at St. James in Manhattan, particularly enjoys asking "why is this in the lectionary?" and "why are these readings lumped together?" I, too.

Some passages seem so violent or harsh.

• Citing Psalm 140.10, Suarez writes simply, "Ouch." But if we're going to truly pray for our enemies, she tells us, it's honest to start with any of the numerous passages of Scripture that call on God to smite them down.
• The exclusion of the foolish maidens has given Suarez problems, but she concludes that the problem is not in their failure to plan, but their leaving to get more oil, missing the arrival of the bridegroom. They lack faith in the bounty of the bridegroom and they overestimate the importance of their to-do list.
• Those poor goats in Matthew 25.40 cause Suarez to look beyond the barnyard to the essential truth that the King's sole criterion for inclusion is the flock's compassion.
• Ecclesiastes is a "challenging" book, but one of her favorites, Suarez writes. "It makes a sacred space for our ambivalence and disillusionment -- the kind of feelings we might be ashamed to bring to God in prayer is right there on the page."

Other passages convey something more in juxtaposition.

• "Earth is full of your love" (Psalm 119.64) is paired with Jesus's being spat upon and slapped (Mt. 26). Suarez doesn't buy the idea that Jesus was taking punishment that God would inflict on us, since God teaches us how to forgive those who trespass against us. Rather, she ties the two scriptures together: God "loved us enough [to] go wherever humanity led him...our companion through anything and everything."
• Scriptures of welcoming and acceptance (Ps 50, Rom 15.7, Joshua 9.3-21 Mt. 26.69-75) remind Suarez how to handle panhandlers on the streets of New York: "Give them what they ask for." It's none of our business what they do with our change.
• She points out that the Continental Congress passed a law against praying for the King or Parliament on the same day as it passed the Declaration; but we don't get to congratulate ourselves if we pray for our enemies. It's just what's expected. In the readings set for July 4 (Ps 145, Dt 10.17-21, Heb 11.8-16, Mt. 5.43-48), she sees concern for community, justice, impartiality, love of enemies, care for the sojourner and the widow.
• Relating "I am the vine, you are the branches" to Paul's image of grafting the Gentiles onto the olive vine of Israel, Suarez points out Rahab's name in Jesus's geneology -- a woman, sex-worker, foreigner -- "grafted" into our faith's "family tree."

On St. James Day, Suarez tells how the brothers John and James get a nickname, "Sons of Thunder," for their assertiveness. I'd assumed "Thunder" was a family name, but her reading looks right to me now. She asks a fun and thought-provoking question, "What nickname would Jesus give to you?"

Biking Viking Country

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Scott Smoot riding Iceland's Highway 1, the "Ring Road," virtually

Since May 15, I've biked 1600 miles around Atlanta. On the map of my virtual tour of the world, that distance takes me from Gander, Newfoundland to Reykjavik, Iceland, where Vikings settled over 1000 years ago.

In the photo, I'm joining a bike tour around Highway 1, Iceland's "Ring Road." I'm a little under-dressed, as the temperature in July is 13.5 Celsius, or 56 Fahrenheit.

Mom and Dad toured Iceland in 2000. They toured without their usual travel partners, my Uncle Jack and Aunt Blanch, who missed their plane. [Find what I've posted about them all at my Family Corner.] Mom's postcard shows a little disappointment -- "The weather was clear 1 of the 3 days" -- but Dad, the geologist, got a kick from seeing roads paved with lava, inspecting a geothermal power station, and experiencing a magnitude 6.2 earthquake -- which, Mom says, they did not feel. Though I've never been to Iceland, I can use the transitive property to include it on my itinerary of "places I've lived or loved."

You may wonder how I reached the island on a bike. The apposite principle of physics, discovered by DC Comics, is explained in Biking to Iceland (06/2022).

 

 

1600 miles from Newfoundland to Iceland
May 15 - July 30, 2022

←← | ← || → Use the arrows to follow the entire bike tour from the beinning.

Poems from July

In retirement, I'm sticking to the classroom routine that enabled 7th graders to produce poems that surprised them and delighted me. The 7th graders themselves are a subject in this month's poems. As always, images by artist Susan Rouse complement each post. One of those is included here. Here are my poems from July posted to my blog First Verse, plus one about a morning last July:

• Angels Never Know true heaven
• Dear 7th Grade learning in a pandemic
• Wingtips a grandmother's magic
• Atlanta, Sunrise Saturday dramas glimpsed on Freedom Trail by a passing cyclist

"Nope": Mares and Nightmares

Horses appear throughout Jordan Peele's latest horror-thriller Nope, but the first animal we see is in a flashback to a chimpanzee covered in blood on the set of a TV sitcom of the 1990s. The connection between that incident and the main story is never made explicit. That's part of what makes Peele's work stick: in the night and morning since I saw Nope, I've been seeing it in my head, thinking, shuddering, and smiling. [UPDATE: two more days of same.]

[Much of what I wrote about Jordan Peele's previous movie could be said about this one, too. See Is Jordan Peele's Us US?]

About the chimp, we have a clear connection to a child actor Ricky "Jupe" Park on the set of the doomed show. Jupe (Steven Yeun), now a grownup, runs a cheesy Western-theme park close to the ranch where most of the action takes place. He puts on a show for live audiences that he calls "Star Lasso." But why is he even in the movie? My friend Susan has a theory: trained animals go rogue in both stories. There's a principle reiterated by horse-trainer OJ Haywood (Daniel Kaluuya), "Don't look them in the eye." Also, she observed, balloons are involved.

(The day after I posted this, I suddenly understood why Ricky calls his show "Star Lasso." Peele only implies the answer. Wise choice. Had I known, I wouldn't have gone to see the movie.)

Comments in the media have centered on the themes of film and fame. Haywood and his sister Emerald (Keke Palmer) train horses for film studios. When they become aware that a hill overlooking their ranch has become HQ for a UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon, a.k.a. UFO), their first thought is to monetize it. Every other character has the same idea. Peele's epigraph is from the Old Testament, Nahum's prophecy that the destruction of the Assyrian capital Nineveh will be "a spectacle."

The image that made me laugh and clutch my armrest at the same time, every time, was the split-second glimpse of a UAP as it darts from one cloud to another like Bugs Bunny ducking from tree to tree to evade Elmer Fudd. But when it dives in for its close-up, it's just scary.

Another image I won't forget is the view from inside the ranch house during a downpour, when the rain mixes with blood. Then there's the heart-stopping moment in flashback when the chimp, paused in his rampage, turns towards the young Jupe's hiding place.

Other images I list just for my own future reference. To explain would give too much away. There's a motorcyclist in a full-head reflective helmet with only a cyclops lens for a visor, and there's what happens when an alien force suddenly saps all the power from his bike. There's a giant inflatable cowboy. There are the air-blown "dancing men" that wriggle up and down at roadside attractions, and the moment that we suddenly understand why OJ and his team have stolen dozens of them to scatter all over their ranch. There's a fiberglass horse attached to a string of multi-colored pennants, and there's the use OJ makes of it.

I wasn't sure how much I was enjoying the movie before OJ and Em brought in allies -- a whacked-out technician from a big box store, and a raspy-voiced cinematographer. It took a while for me to appreciate the siblings' comic banter, i.e., she banters, he grunts. When we see the team enacting their plan to capture their visitor on film -- and, by the way, save humanity -- I was roped in.

Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris: Beauty and Kindness

"This is your lucky day!" says the title character in Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris, and she makes it so for others. Her kindness comes back around for her, too.

Leslie Manville stars in the new film directed by Anthony Fabian (sharing writing credits with Carroll Cartwright, Keith Thompson, and Olivia Hetreed) from the novel by Paul Gallico.

My friend Susan was struck by the convergence in Mrs. Harris of both kindness and a love of beauty. Ada Harris is a war widow in late-1950s London who cleans homes to make her modest living. A gorgeous Dior gown in one lady's wardrobe gives Mrs. Harris a new goal in life, to buy a "frock" for herself from the house of Dior in Paris. Through luck and pluck, she gets to Paris.

But Paris reeks of trash from a sanitation workers' strike, while Dior's high-end customers fail to pay their high-end bills. Here, too, Mrs. Harris cleans up others' messes through empathy and her courage to stand up herself and for others who are treated unfairly.

Among the characters she helps are Dior's young financial officer Fauvel (Lucas Bravo) and one of Dior's models Natasha (Alba Baptista). While they team up to assist her, she tries to nudge them into relationship. But the real matchmaker is Jean-Paul Sartre: the two beautiful young people bond over the philosopher's Being and Nothingness.

Not being seen as you really are is a theme in Sartre that emerges naturally from a story about high fashion. Judged by her modest appearance, Mrs. Harris is at first excluded by Dior's assistant Claudine Colbert (Isabelle Huppert). Others in the story who have the accoutrements of class are crass cheapskates. One character who calls Mrs. Harris "nobody" admits her true self is "invisible". Even a film in which the character Natasha appears is called Invisible Amour.

The apotheosis of that theme is the man who tells Mrs. Harris that her beauty is something in her, not what she wears.

This gentle comedy is scored by Rael Jones with sensitivity and a nod to the use of strings in the pop music of the 1950s. The main theme is a wistful waltz. Jones meets the challenge presented by a fashion show, where each model projects a different image, building to the dress that tops them all.

When you see the film, well, that's your lucky day.

BIrthday Ride, 63 miles for 63 years

Note for next time: it was a good idea to park midway in the Silver Comet Trail's first 25 miles, ride east, then west, then to take lunch break at the car at 50 miles. The last 13 miles were a piece of cake.

Remembering Jack C. Maier, 1925-2005

Jack, left, with his very young uncle Frank, and going to war

On this blog, I've written memorials for members of the generations that were the loving grownups for me and my siblings. But Uncle Jack C. Maier died just before I started to blog.

Details of his life and career were covered in many publications at the time of his death. He was a prominent businessman, joining his father-in-law Dave Frisch in building the Big Boy Restaurants from a local Cincinnati eatery to a nationally recognized brand. I remember also that he competed in horse shows, flew his own plane, and assisted my father in starting a business.

For more personal memories of Uncle Jack, I can do no better than my brother's letter to our Aunt Blanche. Our father Tom Smoot read the letter aloud in his eulogy for Jack at a service in Cincinnati on Friday, February 4, 2005.

Blanche,

The sad news of Jack passing this morning did not come as a shock, but the news brought an immediate rush of loss to us all. Today is a sad day to all that have been fortunate to have been taken under his wing. There is the loss of a husband and brother to two strong women. There is the loss of a father to all the children that your family raised. There is the loss of a man who balanced authority with love, intelligence with humor and determination with humility.

My summers spent in Cincinnati where always a special time for me. The Monday Night Dinners, days at the farm, cross country trips, playing tennis, playing golf, going the a Red's game or simply seating in the kitchen are all vivid, happy memories for me - and Uncle Jack is a part of each memory. He was not actively in each event, but his presence was felt at all times in Cincinnati. I never wanted to displease Uncle Jack - his approval was always needed and desired.

As we have gotten older, I have an even greater respect for what you two accomplished as husband and wife. I look at the strength of your family. I look at determination against odds that members of your family have faced and beaten. No doubt the love that binds your family offers the will to overcome. The love that started with you and Jack has multiplied with each child, each grandchild and I dare say with a few nephews and nieces.

Please know that the love that started with you and Jack will now come full circle and embrace you with all of the power and grace begun with you two.

Please know that Uncle Jack will always be with me - and I am a better person because of him. I will miss Jack, but I will never be without him.

Love to you and the whole family... Todd L. Smoot

(l-r) Frances M. Smoot, her older brother Jack Maier and his wife Blanche, ca. 1975

Accessible Art

Percy Shelley, poet mentioned in williez's blog

My article about Billy Collins Ten Poems too Many? (06/2006) is one of my all-time biggest hits, drawing more comments than any other.

Re-reading my response to a reader named williez, I think it's worth elevating to full blogpost status:

This question of "accessibility" comes up a lot in all the things I love, not just in poetry. Stephen Sondheim's musicals have been commercial flops and "inaccessible"; symphonic composers of the mid-20th century fell into opposing camps - those who continued to use rhythm, melody, and harmony to create dramatic or beautiful effects, and the others who aimed for a purity of technique unsullied by emotion - typified by Milton Babbitt's famous question to the public, "Who cares if you listen?" (surprise! He was Stephen Sondheim's tutor.)

Your response made me wonder at this part: Popular poetry rehashes an outmoded aesthetic: the single-subject "I," the "poem-as-truth," the "look how observant and sensitive I am," the "open-a-vein-and-let-my-truth-spill-out" hokeyness.

When I do connect to a poem, I would like to think it's because the writer has found a way -- be it an image, an anecdote, a bit of rhetoric -- to express something that I didn't know I knew and recognize immediately to be true.

I, too, can't stand the stuff that's all about "me, the poet." But I like the stuff about the poet's world that, deep down, is about me, too.

 [See a curated list of my blogposts about Collins and many other poets at my page Poetry and Secular Psalms.   I've been posting poetry of my own at a blog I call First Verse.  Yes, it's drawn from my experience. And, yes, it's accessible.]

One More American Gothic Parody for July 4th Weekend

My sister Kim and I were sending a photo to our nephew Craig, when I noticed some resemblance to Grant Wood's famous oil painting of another brother and sister back around 1930.

I found a photo of the original home on Wikipedia. Paint 3D isolated figures, including the farming implement. BeFunky.com helped me to make an oil painting of the result.

The Cork O'Connor Mysteries, Books 1 - 10: Still Growing

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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.