Desolation Mountain

Desolation Mountain (Cork O’Connor, 17) William Kent Krueger. Atria Paperback (ISBN: 9781501147470) 2019.

Summary: When a U.S. senator’s plane crashes, Cork seeks the truth behind the crash and Stephen, a recurring dream.

Stephen kept having the same dream. He’s watching a boy who is and is not him. An eagle appears out of the clouds. The boy draws a bow, looses an arrow and brings down the bird. As the bird falls, an egg drops from it. Then the boy is looking at him. Or rather behind him at what he senses is an enormous, terrifying beast. He awakens as they scream together.

Stephen talks to Henry, the old mide to make sense of the dream. So far, they cannot. But Stephen somehow realizes he fears for Henry.

Then the plane crash occurs near Desolation Mountain. A U.S. Senator and her family, coming to discuss a mining project with the townspeople, die in the crash. Cork, part of a volunteer Search and Rescue team are first on the scene. Stephen joins him. Was the plane the eagle? Stephen is deeply troubled. If he’d understood, could it have been prevented?

All sorts of Federal investigators, including the FBI, show up. The site is cordoned off, and Stephen, studying the scene from the mountain is briefly held by some kind of authority figure. However, he momentarily sees another young man. Locals, including Sheriff Marsha Dross, are pulled off the case. Officially, the cause is given out as “pilot error.” They say there was no flight recorder.

But in that case, what are people looking for at the crash site? Is it the “egg” in Stephen’s dream? Then some tribal members, who were first on the crash site disappear. So Cork starts investigating. He discovers a man he’d worked with before is also in town. Bo Thorson is a former Secret Service Agent. At one point he took a bullet to save the life of the wife of the Vice president. Based on his past experience, Cork is willing to trust him and share info. Stephen and Henry intuit something different. And Thorson does save Cork at one point when Cork is set up for a “hit.” He gave Cork a bullet proof vest that saved his life. But Stephen and Henry are right. Bo is dividing his loyalties, and Cork and his family are “expendables.”

Cork recognizes his family is in danger. He and Stephen and his son-in-law Daniel were also early on the scene. So they shelter with Henry. But they make a mistake. Bo also knows where they are.

The young man in the dream is important. He is a photographer and captured a damning piece of evidence on film, that points to the people and motivations behind the crash. But will Cork close in on the truth before those who endanger him and his family close in on them?

Finally, Stephen does finally summons the courage to look at the beast at his back. But I’ll leave that for the reader to discover.

Bo Thorson is a complicated figure. I think he really wants to return Cork’s trust and sees something in the life of Cork’s family he has missed. Also, Waboo, Jenny’s adopted son also seems to have some special gift. He also sees monsters in the woods. Meanwhile, Stephen, having to fight impulses, is slowly growing into his own calling. What I do wonder is how Krueger will develop Cork further. As time goes on, he is identifying more deeply with his tribal ancestry. What is clear is that Krueger is a master at developing the sense of dark foreboding we encounter in Stephen’s dream and both Henry and Waboo’s sense of evil in the woods. It keeps one turning the pages!

Sulphur Springs

Sulphur Springs (Cork O’Connor, 16), William Kent Krueger. Atria Books (ISBN: 9781501147432) 2018.

Summary: A garbled message from Rainy’s son Peter about trouble sends Cork and Rainy to Arizona to help, threatening their own lives.

The phone in Cork and Rainy’s bedroom went to voicemail before Rainy could answer it. It was her son, Peter. in a garbled message, Peter said he was in trouble and something about murdering someone named Rodriquez. It was clear that they needed to go to Arizona, where Peter was living. But this is hard for Rainy. Peter wasn’t the only Bisonette who’d killed a man.

Peter was Rainy’s son by her first marriage. After time in the military, he grew addicted to drugs. After a stay at a re-hab program, he was clean. Or so they believed. The last they’d heard, he was working with the program. But when they arrive, they learn he hasn’t worked there in a year. He’d also gone missing from his current work at a vineyard. A visit to Sulphur Springs, where Peter gets his mail turns up nothing. No one seems to know him. But they get the distinct impression people are lying.

Early on, someone warns them to trust no one. And the advice seems warranted. Even after the bit of poking around they did, the rented Jeep they were driving exploded when, on a cold morning, Corked used the remote ignition fob to warm it up. The only one who would help them was the Methodist minister whose church Peter attended. She loaned them her truck and the use of the parsonage.

As they try to piece together what is going on, they discover the Rodriquez name is tied to a ruthless drug cartel, that Peter has been part of a secretive group assisting border refugees called the Desert Angels, and there is another group, White Horse, opposed to any efforts to assist immigrants. In addition, there are people on the inside who are compromised. It could be anyone.

At one point someone kidnaps Rainy. Cork is captured and “sweated.” And a name out of the past turns up to rescue them. Mondragon. Rainy’s first husband. He’d bankrolled Peter’s treatment. Then the question of trust becomes more personal. Rainy stays hidden with Mondragon while Cork tracks Peter. And Cork wonders if he can trust Rainy’s love. Mondragon is rich and powerful. And Cork is learning Rainy has secrets.

Trust and betrayal. As in many cases, large sums of money play a part. As the young man risks his life to save immigrants on a kind of “Underground Railroad,” Cork is not the only one hunting him. Who will prevail? And will trust prevail over betrayal?

Manitou Canyon

Manitou Canyon (Cork O’Connor, 15), William Kent Krueger. Atria Books (ISBN: 9781476749273) 2017.

Summary: A man disappears during a camping trip and the grandchildren hire Cork to find him days before Jenny’s wedding.

Cork O’Connor would disagree with T.S., Eliot. For him, November, not April, is the cruelest month. His father, wife, and Sam Winter Moon, his best friend all died in November. And his daughter Jenny is planning a November wedding to Daniel English, Rainy’s nephew. Waaboo would have a father. It seems an auspicious event to change the character of November for Cork. But he still has his fears.

They deepen when two young people, grandchildren of John Harris come to see him. John left Aurora years ago and eventually headed up an enormously successful construction firm. However, in October, he returned to the areas to go on a camping trip in the Boundary Waters with Lindsay and Trevor, his two grandchildren. One afternoon, he went missing while the three of them were separated. Cork was part of the Search and Rescue team. But they could find no trace of him, and eventually the search was called off.

Now, Trevor and Lindsay want to hire him to resume the search. Just two weeks before Jenny’s wedding. What persuades him is a dream Trevor recounts, in which Cork’s son Stephen comes to him and speaks of “mounterths under the bed,” a family memory. Cork agrees to make a three day trip to Raspberry Lake, where Harris went missing. A friend with a float plane would fly them Cork and Lindsay in and out. Sheriff Dross would lend him a sat phone to keep in contact. What could go wrong?

What couldn’t? They land on Raspberry Island. Overnight, they spot a light on a nearby lookout. In the morning Cork goes to explore, climbing a cliff too difficult for Lindsay. When he comes down, she is missing, only her “where’s Waldo” stocking cap left behind. He pursues, to where the others might have landed and is attacked by a man with a knife. In the struggle, the man dies by his own knife. Then Cork is knocked out. When he comes to, an enraged woman wants to kill him. The leader prevents this. There’s also a young man, a sharpshooter. Except he gashes a knee during a portage, which becomes badly infected.

While Lindsay and Cork’s captors press north toward Canada, a search begins when Cork fails to report in or show up to be picked up. A search of the island shows where they camped, and where the man bled out. Meanwhile, Stephen, deeply worried for his father with a sense of heaviness, returns from a pilgrimage out west. Henry also speaks of a great darkness over Cork, a battle he must fight.

To make matters more interesting, Rainy’s Aunt Leah shows up uninvited for the wedding. Half a century ago, Henry rejected her affections, and she’d never forgotten, or apparently, forgiven it. But the rest of the O’Connor clan does their thing. Jenny gets on the internet while Daniel pursues contacts in law enforcement to figure out Trevor’s winning ways at the casino. Meanwhile, Rose cooks, and prays.

A question hovers over the disappearance. How did the captors know that Cork and Lindsay were coming? It’s a question both Cork and the folks back in Aurora figure out about the same time. It turns out there is far more than kidnappings involved. An underground network involved in a number of “disruptions” wants to blow up a dam in Manitou Canyon. Rainy has dreamt of a flood deluging thousands.

I’ll leave it to you to figure out how all this connects and what happens. Will Cork make it back for the wedding? Or will November remain the cruelest month? Needless to say, Krueger sets up another thrilling finish!

Windigo Island, (Cork O’Connor, 14), William Kent Krueger. Atria Books (ISBN: 9781476749242) 2025.

Summary: Cork, Jenny, and Henry join in a search for a missing Ojibwe girl when her friend’s body washes up on a sinister island.

It began as a daring prank of a teenage boy trying to impress a girl. Windigo Island was a rocky outcropping in the middle of Lake Superior. If you’ve been reading the series, you know that nothing good comes from a windigo, a cannibal beast. To hear a windigo call your name is to hear oneself targeted for death. And so the island had a reputation for being haunted.. It also had a rock face that was visible from shore, perfect for spray-painted messages. Bravado wins out over fear until a weird wind comes up and a terrible something is washed up on the rocks.

That “something” was the body of a fourteen-year old Chippewa girl, Carrie Verga. She, and her friend, Mariah Arceneaux, had disappeared a year before. Mariah’s family, related to Henry Meloux and Rainy, reach out to Cork for help in finding Mariah. Because of the way Rainy contacted Cork, Jenny decides to come along. And when she hears the story of the missing Mariah, she decides that she must be part of the search, which Cork reluctantly accepts. Because of the family connection, Henry insists on joining the search as well, even though he is nearly one hundred.

As it turns out, they are all needed–Jenny’s research, Cork’s investigative skills, and Henry’s quiet but courageous wisdom. For they are facing far more than a missing girl. Rather, they are facing a formidable enemy, a windigo, who even uses that name. He heads up a trafficking operation of underage girls servicing the needs of the men on lake freighters out of Duluth, male executives on yachts, and ultimately, North Dakota oil rig workers. Despite warnings, and despite both Cork and Jenny hearing their names from the windigo, the team persists, convinced that Mariah is in thrall to Windigo.

An Arceneaux family member, Daniel English, a game warden, also joins them. In an interesting subplot, Daniel and Jenny show a developing interest in each other. All of them make their way to North Dakota. To hear one’s name by a windigo marks one for death. But Cork and Henry have faced this before. Confronting a windigo means both facing down one’s fears, and becoming something of a windigo oneself. The question is, is Jenny up to this? The climax will have you on the edge of your seat.

As is already obvious, Jenny plays a big part in this book and Krueger develops her character further. Krueger also continues to explore the cost to Cork of standing between evil and those he cares about. This does not come without dangers to his soul. He needs Henry, though he does not always realize it.

Finally, William Kent Krueger exposes the evil of child sex trafficking. Whether servicing men in remote settings or the billionaire set, we see how perpetrators groom them and how men use them and discard them like trash. However, we also see the courageous work of those who seek to rescue women and work with survivors. Sadly the reality of the need for such work is no fiction.