"Iron Lake" by William Kent Krueger

I first read William Kent Krueger’s literary novels, like Ordinary Grace and This Tender Land. Then I discovered he had written a considerable number of mysteries, the Cork O’Connor detective novels. In fact, the 21^st in the series was just published last week. I’ve read two of them out of sequence. And now I’m going back to the beginning. 

Iron Lake is the first Cork O’Connor mystery. As the story begins, O’Connor’s professional and private lives are both a shambles. A misstep caused him to lose re-election as sheriff of Aurora, Minnesota, and he and his noted-attorney wife are headed for divorce. He’s living on his own, but he’s also now involved with a local woman.

 

A young Eagle Scout goes missing after almost completely his paper route. The boy’s mother asks O’Connor to find him, and he traces the boy’s route to the last stop – the home of the town judge and a mover and shaker behind just about everything. O’Connor doesn’t find the boy, but he does find the body of the judge. It appears to be a suicide, but O’Connor has his doubts. 

 

Another death – this one definitely a murder – occurs, and O’Connor is convinced the two deaths are related. The new sheriff is in over his head, so O’Connor does some sleuthing on his own – and finds photograph negatives. It seems this dead man like to take compromising photographs, and one set strike close to O’Connor himself. And it appears the man worked for the judge, who may have been up to his eyeballs in blackmail.

 

William Kent Krueger

O’Connor’s father was Irish American, his mother was Anishhinaabe Indian. He fits in neither camp comfortably, but he has a foot in both. And that outsider will serve him well in unraveling the mystery of the two dead men and the missing boy.

 

Krueger’s Cork O’Connor novels are all set in the North Woods of Minnesota. Krueger’s also published three standalone novels: Ordinary Grace, The Devil’s Bed, and This Tender Land. He’s received several awards and recognitions, including the Minnesota Book Award, the Loft-McKnight Fiction Award, the Anthony Award, the Barry Award, the Dilys Award, the Friends of American Writers Prize, and the Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America. His last nine novels were all New York Times bestsellers. Krueger lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.

 

Iron Lake is a finely crafted mystery, with excellent character development, a solid plot, and realistic dialogue. With its nail-biting climax, I’m not sure whether to call it a mystery or a thriller. But it is a thoroughly good read.

 

Related:

 

This Tender Land by William Kent Krueger.

 

Ordinary Grace by William Kent Krueger.

Tamarack County by William Kent Krueger.

 

Lightning Strike by William Kent Krueger.

 

Some Monday Readings

 

Murders for September – Jeremy Black at The Critic Magazine.

 

Just Look Up! – Jonathan Rosen at The Free Press.

 

Endowment returns – editorial by The New Criterion.

"This Tender Land" by William Kent Krueger

It’s 1932, and American society is moving toward the pit of the Great Depression. Odie and Albert O’Banion are brothers, sent as orphans to the Lincoln Indian Training School in Minnesota after the death of their father. Odie is 12 and Albert is 16, and they are the only white faces in a sea of Indian children at the school, removed from their parents for “reeducation.” 

The school is a nasty place, run by a nasty headmistress and her husband. Punishment is meted out by a sadistic worker, who’s rumored to do more than punish disobedient children. Odie has a particular problem with following the school’s rules, and he often finds himself in “the quiet room,” a tiny, unheated cell that more than resembles solitary confinement in a prison. The best thing about the cell is the rat, nicknamed Faria, which visits looking for crumbs. When not in the quiet room, boys will find themselves hired out to local farmers, with their pay going to the school.

The school situation isn’t entirely bleak; a young teacher finds ways to ease the harsh conditions and a janitor befriends Albert and watches out for Odie and their Indian friend Mose, at least until she dies in a tornado and leaves her young daughter an orphan. And then, one night, Odie is sent to the quiet room, and the sadistic worker decides the boy will finally get what’s coming to him. Odie has to fight for his life, and the worker will end up dead from a fall. Odie, Albert, and Mose decide to leave; they take Emmy, the teacher’s daughter, with them and head for the Gilead River. 

Soon they’re canoeing, with the vague plan of finding Odie and Albert’s aunt in St. Louis. In what becomes a kind of Huckleberry Finn story, the group will discover the good and evil in people and the evil of the times. Odie, in particular, will be fleeing from what he calls the Tornado God, the deity that seems only interested in punishment and destruction. The river, in addition to a highway, becomes a place of safety; the group learns that they are only really safe when they’re in the canoe, paddling for St. Louis.

This Tender Land by William Kent Krueger is the story of Odie, Albert, Mose, and Emmy. It’s a coming-of-age story set in harsh economic climate of the 1930s, with its Hoovervilles, desperate people, con men, faith healers, and revivalists like Aimee Semple McPherson. Because it’s a time of extremes, we also see the goodness that exists. Most of all, it’s a story about a boy named Odie, who will learn things about himself he never knew and find ways to survive in what seems a dark, capricious world.

William Kent Krueger

Krueger has published 18 mystery novels in the Cork O’Connor series, set in the North Woods of Minnesota, and three standalone novels: Ordinary Grace, The Devil’s Bed, and This Tender Land. He’s received a number of awards and recognitions, including the Minnesota Book Award, the Loft-McKnight Fiction Award, the Anthony Award, the Barry Award, the Dilys Award, the Friends of American Writers Prize, and the Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America. His last nine novels were all New York Times bestsellers. Krueger lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.

This Tender Land is a moving, engaging novel, even as the narrative hurries a bit too fast toward the end. You find yourself urging Odie and his band to get back to the river to safety, as they’re chased by both villains along the way and the long arm of the school’s headmistress. It’s a story of goodness surviving in the midst of evil, told through the eyes of a young boy. 

Top photograph: Mount Pleasant Indian Industrial Boarding School in Michigan, similar to the fictional school in Krueger's novel.

Margie Haack’s “The Exact Place”

Speaking as a writer, I know that the memoir is a tough genre, especially to get published. You have to be rich, famous or notorious, or perhaps running for President, for most major publishers to seriously consider a manuscript for a memoir. Speaking as a reader, I’ve read very few memoirs, and the ones I’ve read are mostly by writers I’ve enjoyed reading (the ones that comes immediately to mind are The Oak and the Calf by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, published in 1987, and Surprised by Joy, published by C.S. Lewis in 1955).

Then there’s Margie Haack’s The Exact Place. A friend at The High Calling recommended it, telling me Haack and her husband Denis were the founders of Ransom Fellowship in Minnesota, which is “a ministry that includes lecturing, writing, teaching, feeding, and encouraging those who want to know more about what it means to be a Christian in the everyday life of the 21st century.” The memoir, my friend said, was about growing up in Minnesota.

And it is about growing up in Minnesota. Northern Minnesota. Way up northern Minnesota. The description of how far north drove me to the atlas, and Margie Haack grew up about as far north as you can grow up in Minnesota and not be a Canadian.

I wondered why I should read a memoir about growing up way up north, and then I started reading it. It took only a few pages to answer my question.

It’s beautifully written.

It’s written with love and a keen eye for detail, and a keener eye for truth.

It’s about faith and brokenness, about a little girl whose father died in a small plane crash a few months before she was born and who never felt loved by her stepfather, whose own children noticed that their grandfather didn’t love them as much as loved the others.

It’s about growing up poor on a farm in an isolated area, in a farmhouse with no indoor plumbing or running water in the kitchen. It’s about the discovery of reading and how it transformed a girl’s life. It’s about the countless ways children can humiliate each other in school. It’s about a mother’s love, and about growing up with siblings, and getting your first horse. It’s about the things that can terrorize a child’s mind. It’s about food, like homemade wild blueberry pie. It’s about the dogs a child grows up with. It’s about the times you almost burned the house down.

It’s about how a little girl found faith, or how God found a little girl whose heart hurt for a father, and a grown woman recognizing that the relationship she had and didn’t have with her stepfather was a gift.

The Exact Place is about life. It’s serious and funny and emotional and heartbreaking. I laughed and got tears in my eyes. I even recognized some of my own childhood, like reading Black Beauty and Reader’s Digest Condensed Versions and worrying about nuclear attacks from Russia.

Kudos to Kalos Press for publishing it. Kudos to Margie Haack for writing it.