Mercy Falls (Cork O’Connor Number 5), William Kent Krueger. Atria Books (ISBN: 9781439157800) 2009 (First published in 2005).
Summary: Mercy Falls, number five in the Cork O’Connor series finds Cork in a hitman’s sights and danger to his wife in the form of her old flame.
Cork O’Connor, despite reservations from but with the support of Jo O’Connor, is once again sheriff of Tamarack County. One of his practices is to go on calls to the Ojibwe land since he is part Ojibwe. He and deputy answer a domestic violence call. When the deputy, Marsha Dross goes to the house, she is shot by a sniper and Cork must call for help, fight off the attacker, and render first aid. In the end, she survives–barely. But as the investigation proceeds, it is clear the bullet was meant for him. But why?
Meanwhile, Jo is working with a sleazy client, Eddie Jacoby, representing a company that wants to take over the tribal casino management, which has struggled. Then, he is found dead by the overlook to Mercy Falls, gruesomely murdered. There is evidence he’d been with a woman. His rich father and brother arrive from Chicago, along with a “consultant.” Former FBI agent Dina Winter is there to “assist” the investigation and get results. Eddie, for all his troubles, had a special relationship with his father. But the other brother, Ben, is trouble in his own way. Ben and Jo had been in a relationship during law school, before he walked away, and Cork came into her life.
A bomb under the hood of the Cork’s car convinces the family this would be a good time for college visits in the Chicago area, staying with Jo’s sister, now married to Mal. Meanwhile, Cork, now free of family concerns (or so he thinks), goes on a hunt for the sniper. Henry Meloux joins him along with Dina and a deputy. She reveals her skills and there is a growing connection between her and Cork. What Cork hasn’t reckoned with is the danger Jo faces as she comes within reach of the Jacobys.
Krueger explores the complicated relationships between fathers and sons, especially when those relationships come laden with expectations. We also wonder what will happen between Jo and Ben, and between Cork and Dina. These will prove not to be the only tests to the marriage.
This was one of those stories that doesn’t end with the book (I won’t say how). But I’ve got book six in waiting. I just hope Krueger doesn’t do this too often!
Iron Lake(Cork O’Connor #1), William Kent Krueger. New York: Atria Paperbacks, 2019 (20th Anniversary edition, originally published in 1998).
Summary: A murdered judge and a missing paperboy sets former sheriff Cork O’Connor onto the trail of a conspiracy, a trail on which this won’t be the last death.
One of my delightful discoveries of 2023 was the the work of William Kent Krueger, through the recommendation of a fellow reader. Earlier this year I read This Tender Land (review) and Ordinary Grace (review). Both of these are standalone works. Iron Lake is the first book in Krueger’s Cork O’Connor series which has now reached nineteen books.
O’Connor, as we encounter him in this first book is a former sheriff, voted out of office in the small town of Aurora, Minnesota, after a conflict between the Anishinaabe and the townspeople that ended tragically with his mentor from childhood, Sam Winter Moon, lying dead. He is separated from his wife, Jo, and their children, living in Sam’s old quonset hut, which he has inherited, a broken man with a marriage falling apart. O’Connor also lives between two cultures, part Anishinaabe and part Irish, both and neither, entirely..
A call from Darla LeBeau changes everything. Her son Paul, a reliable Eagle Scout, hasn’t come home from delivering papers in a snow storm. He agrees to help and starts at the last house on the route, that of retired Judge Parrant. No Paul, but he gets no further. He find’s Judge Parrant’s body seated at his desk, his brains blown out from a gun held to his mouth and fired. An apparent suicide, but the pooling of blood indicates he was on his back when he died. This was murder.
That sets O’Connor on a trail of a conspiracy, one that mutes people with fear, one that leaves more bodies along the way, and one that will endanger the people Cork loves. It’s a story that involves graft, a casino, and an ambitious newly-elected Senator. The story is full of twists and surprises along the way including what becomes of Paul the paperboy.
It also involves the windigo, a mythical creature that stalks humans. He learned of the windigo when out hunting a great bear with Sam Winter Moon as a boy. Amid all else that is going on, Henry Meloux, an old medicine man says he’d seen the windigo. Then Cork hears the windigo call his name as do others. To hear the windigo call your name is to know it is after you to kill and consume you. Others also hear the windigo call their names. And they all end up dead. The only way to escape this fate is to become a windigo and kill the windigo. And what then…?
Amid all this, Cork awakens to his longing to save his family, even his marriage to Jo. Tender scenes at Christmas give us hope until pictures of each in compromising situations unravel everything, part of a trove of incriminating evidence used to control the town. But who is doing the controlling?
Krueger gives us a page-turning novel with a protagonist both flawed and of great depth. It is a great introduction that left this reader wanting to read more of Cork O’Connor. Aak! Another great series! At least I don’t have to wonder what to read after all the Gamache books!
Ordinary Grace, William Kent Krueger. New York: Atria Books, 2013.
Summary: Two boys in a rural Minnesota town encounter a series of deaths, including one within their family, and discover something of the “awful grace of God.”
The writing of William Kent Krueger has been my discovery of this summer. How grateful I am for the person who recommended his work to me! Ordinary Grace is a standalone novel set in a rural Minnesota town in 1961. The story centers around Frank Drum, the narrator, and his younger brother, Jake. Jake stutters, and is often silent, but also always seeing and often insightful. Their father is a pastor, responsible for a three church charge. Their mother is a musician, once in love with the town’s music professor, Emil Brandt, who had returned from war blinded, physically and emotionally damaged, who lives with his sister Lise, a deaf spinster attached to Emil and to her garden. Instead, Ruth Drum ended up marrying Nathan Drum when he was ambitious to become a lawyer. War changed all that, a survivor of too many battles, having lost too many men, hearing a call from God amid the loss. Ruth tried to make the best of what she had not expected, living the life of a pastor’s life instead of being the spouse of an up and coming lawyer. Nathan came back with one of those he did not lose, Gus, who loves drink too much, gets into fights, lives in the church basement, getting by on odd jobs about the town. Surprisingly, Gus is a confidant of Nathan who he calls “Captain” and often advisor to the boys.
The other person in this circle is Ariel, the Drum’s daughter, just graduated from high school, a gifted singer and composer, headed to Juilliard, representing the unfulfilled dreams of her mother. She is dating Karl Brandt, nephew to Emil and son of the wealthy brewing family who live in a mansion at the top of the hill and drives a sporty convertible. At one point, Frank spots her slipping out in the middle of the night, returning before morning. Shortly after, she begins to reconsider her Juilliard plans.
The story spans a single summer, filled with a mixture of normal adventures, a scrap with Morris Engdahl, the town bully, at the quarry, where they get the best of him, and encounters with a mysterious Native American living in a shanty down by the river, Warren Redstone. It is also a story that progresses by a series of deaths to which Frank is a party–the first is Bobby Cole, a mentally challenged boy, struck by a train passing over a tressle near the town where Bobby was sitting. Then Frank spots the body of a mysterious stranger, an itinerant who had died. Redstone is nearby, but had nothing to do with the death.
The next death is the hardest. Ariel doesn’t come home after partying with friends following an event where a musical piece she wrote was performed. A desperate search follows but it is Frank who finds her spotting her body in the river. Engdahl, Redstone, and Emil all are suspects. For some mysterious reason Frank can’t explain, he lets Redstone escape when the authorities are in pursuit, probably saving his life.
The tragedy hits them all hard. Jake gives up on God. Ruth separates from Nathan, who represents the God with whom she is angry. The tragedy deepens with the results of the autopsy and the events that follow. The words of Aeschylus are used at one point, “the awful grace of God” and it is this Nathan wrestles with as he tries to grapple with this death and guide his broken family and flock. He says,
“‘I confess that I have cried out to God, ‘Why have you forsaken me?’…’When we feel abandoned, alone, and lost, what’s left to us? What do I have, what do you have, what do any of us have left except the overpowering temptation to rail against God and to blame him for the dark night into which he’s led us, to blame him for our misery, to blame him and cry out against him for not caring? What’s left to us when that which we love most has been taken?
‘I will tell you what is left, three profound blessings. In his first letter to the Corinthians, Saint Paul tells us exactly what they are: faith, hope, and love. These gifts, which are the foundation of eternity, God has given to us and he’s given us complete control over them. Even to the darkest night it’s still within our power to hold to faith. We can still embrace hope. And although we may ourselves feel unloved we can still stand steadfast in our love for others and for God. All this is in our control. God gave us these gifts and he does not take them back. It is we who choose to discard them.“
We see people wrestling with the hardest of tragedies and struggling to hold onto the ordinary graces of God as they face this “awful” grace–these seemingly inexplicable ways of God. People practice ordinary grace in all their brokenness–Gus and officer Doyle fighting and then forgiving, an outing on horses at Gus’s girlfriend Ginger’s farm, congregation members providing food, music, prayers. A moment when Ruth and Frank sit together on the tressle where he’d spotted Ariel’s body, and grieve and extend comfort to each other.
The phrase “ordinary grace” is actually used only once in the book. At a reception after the funeral services, Nathan is unable to offer a grace before the dinner, wordless in his own grief. People look at one another wondering who will pray. Jake, who has turned away from God, says he will. And he prays without stuttering. Frank recalls:
“That was it. That was all of it. A grace so ordinary there was no reason at all to remember it. Yet I have never across the forty years since it was spoken forgotten a single word.”
Jake never stuttered again, finding the miracle he needed to believe again.
Krueger plumbs the depths of the darkness of inexplicable tragedy, those places we are inclined to wonder where God is and to rail against God. In one sense, there are no answers to dispel the darkness. Yet Krueger leads us to believe that for those who hold on, there is the ordinary grace to go on, holding to faith, hope, and love. There is no grace to make life go smoothly and tragedy-free. Life is not like that. But Krueger, in these ordinary, broken people in a small town, reveals the unconditional love of God in the love they give each other, and the faith that turns to God in anger, grief, hope, and a prayer before a meal, in which a quiet miracle takes place.
Summary: Four orphans fleeing the Lincoln Indian Training School due to a crime of self-defense embark on a journey to and on the Mississippi to find a relative they hope will provide a home and shelter.
Albert O’Banion and his younger brother Odie were orphans sent by family to live, by special arrangement, at the Lincoln Indian Training School. For the most part it was a brutal existence under the cruel headmistress, Thelma Brickman, known as “the Black Witch” and her grifter husband, and under the brutal strappings (and worse abuse) from Vincent DiMarco, who took care of the grounds. There were glimpses of kindness from Herman Volz, who secretly ran a still with mechanically clever Albert, and from a teacher, Cora Frost. They were also close to Mose, one of the Indian students, with whom they communicated by sign because his tongue had been cut out as a child
Cora Frost had the boys do some work for her. Her daughter, Emma, who suffered “fits,” took to them and Mrs. Frost was on the point of adopting them when a tornado hit, killing her beneath the wreckage, sparing Emma, who instead joined the boys under “the Black Witch.” At this point Odie is convinced that God is the shepherd who eats his sheep one by one, the Tornado God who takes away those you love. Things come to head and lead to the narrative that fills the rest of the book. Odie discovers the truth about the disappearence of an Indian boy. It has to do with DiMarco, who in turn sets out to kill Odie, pushing him over a cliff. A projection saves him and he grabs the strap hanging at DiMarco’s waist, which had inflicted so much hurt, pulling DiMarco over the edge, to his death.
Now a murderer, he must flee. His brother Albert, Mose, and Emma join him and they become “the Four Vagabonds” on their own journey down the Mississippi, reprising Huck Finn. A canoe left at the Frost place conveys them down the Gilead, then the Minnesota River to the Mississippi. Their goal, as improbable as it is, would be to make it to St. Louis, where Albert and Odie have an Aunt Julia with a big home and heart, hoping she will take them all in.
Traveling the river, they elude the manhunt on land to find the “kidnappers” of Emma, who is traveling willingly with them. For some strange reason, the Brickmans are focused on her. The remainder of the story traces their journeys on the river and their encounters both with the worst and the best of human beings during the summer of 1932, deep in the Depression. They pass through Hoovervilles and shanty towns. They take up with a traveling revival, whose Sister Eve discerns the special gift latent in Emma’s fits. The others discover more of themselves as well, from the site of a terrible slaughter of Sioux that sends Mose on a vision quest, to Albert, who realizes his mechanical gifts, and to Odie, who discovers what he really wants, which connects to his full name, Odysseus.
In the backdrop of all of this is the vast landscape of Middle America, heartbreakingly beautiful at times. It is the place of the forced subjugation of Native Peoples, represented by Indian schools who sought “to kill the Indian to save the man within.” It’s the place of contrasts between conspicuous wealth and bereft families traveling across the land hoping for a new start, often finding hopes dashed.
Amid all this are the four, bound together to protect one another and especially Emma. Despite the tensions between Albert and Odie, the mechanic and the storyteller, Albert is committed to look out for his younger brother. There are touching scenes of nights when it was safe when Odie played harmonica and told stories under the vast starscape, encouraging them all.
William Kent Krueger has given us not only a Huck Finn story but also an odyssey, leaving us reading breathlessly to discover whether they will find the home they are looking for or will be captured by the wicked Brickmans. For Odie, it is a spiritual odyssey as well as we wonder whether he will bitterly believe to the last only in the Tornado God or find some measure of grace. This finely written work was the first of Kreuger’s I’ve read. It won’t be the last.
