Windigo Island by William Kent Krueger

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Cork O’Conner is part anglo and part Anishinaabe of Tamarack County in upper Minnesota. He is an Ogichidaa - one who stands between good and evil. A local who went to Chicago to be a cop, returned to be the county sheriff and is now quasi retired as a private investigator. Lives with his daughter Jenny and her adopted toddler son Waaboo and his son Stephan. A third daughter is a nun in training.

Two 14yo girls disappeared a year ago from the Bad Bluff reservation just outside of Superior, Wisconsin. Indian kids run away all the time, some never to return. One of the girls washes up on the shore of a tiny Apostle Island, dead. The other girl, Mariah Arceneaux, is still missing and her family wants Cork to try and track her down. A local game warden/Ojibwe, Daniel English (and hopefully, a new continuing character), knows the girl’s family and joins the hunt. But so does Jenny. This case strikes a cord with Jenny because of some circumstances that brought Waaboo to her. Henry Meloux, the 90ish Ojibwe healer recognizes the danger ahead and wants to join in on one last hunt.

The search begins routinely talking with neighbors, extended family, friends, classmates, local cops, about the 2 girls bringing Cork, Jenny, and Daniel to a single conclusion. Mariah was enticed to leave the reservation where there is no future to go to Duluth and ends up in a child prostitution ring run by a particularly vile and violent man known as Windigo – more devil than human.

Digging through the underbelly of Duluth, they find that prostitutes have worked the far western end of the Great Lakes for decades. The slowdown in lake shipping hasn’t stalled the trade because tourist boaters have picked up the slack. A meeting with the head of a halfway house for these girls narrows their search eventually to a trailer outside of Williston, North Dakota, one of the many oil-rich boomtowns in the region.

Henry Meloux explains a common theme in the few Cork O’Connor books I’ve read. There are two wolves fighting within each of us – one of love and peace and the other of fear and anger. The one that is winning is the one that is being fed. In Windigo Island, the fear and anger wolf inside O’Connor grows with each page to the point where coldblooded murder looms large. What would justify such an act? Revenge, justice, blood lust, or as they say in other lawless places, ‘he just needed killing’?

This is my 4^th book by Krueger. While trolling Barnes and Noble a while back, the jacket blurb for Trickster’s Point brought me in. Krueger’s publicist must’ve liked what he read because since then, the good folks at Atria Books (a Simon and Schuster imprint) have sent 3 other Krueger books for review (this one plus Tamarack County and the 2014 Edgar Award winner for Best Novel, Ordinary Grace – one of the very best books I’ve ever read; for those not familiar with book awards, that’s the equivalent of winning the Best Picture Oscar, at least to me it is).

But here is my personal quandary. Each of us here at MRB maintains our own ‘power rotation’ of authors (you have to dig deep in the website to find our individual lists). Implicit in each list is that each author is currently active (e.g., Lee Child, Stephen Hunter, Brad Thor, et al.). With the unfortunate death of the great Vince Flynn, I’m thinking I need to move him to my emeritus list that includes people like Tom Clancy and Tony Hillerman, which would open up a slot in my power rotation. While I’m not ready put Krueger there just yet, he certainly is one of my hole cards for right now. Jonathon King? Roger Smith? Maybe, if they were more productive. Krueger has 14 O’Connor books in his bibliography now and I’ve read 3. My plan is to start actively prowling the local library to see how many I can find.

Here is my other quandary on Krueger. Years ago (very pre-blog), I got hooked on the Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee novels by the late Tony Hillerman. Once hooked, I tore right through his catalogue of writing. Hillerman wrote of the Navajo in the Four Corners region of the southwest US. To me, his writing was evidence of him being almost ‘inside’ the Navajo nation. I loved it and have since looked for an author to fill that void. Krueger’s books, while consistently excellent, seem to be more by one who is a very keen observer, but not quite from the ‘inside’ in the manner of Hillerman’s books. But comparison with Hillerman is probably not fair because I seriously doubt we will ever see one with his feel for Native Americans. If you know of one, PLEASE let me know.  Why do I like these types of books so much? I don’t know, maybe it the 1/16 of me that is Cherokee. 

Release date is August 19, 2014.

East Coast Don