Thunder Bay (Cork O'Connor Series #7) » (Reprint)

William Kent Krueger is the award-winning author of ten Cork O'Connor novels, including Heaven's Keep and Vermilion Drift. All are available from Atria Books. He lives in the Twin Cities with his family. Visit his website at www.williamkentkrueger.com.

From acclaimed author William Kent Krueger comes the seventh profound, action-packed suspense novel in his award-winning Cork O'Conner mystery series.

The promise, as I remember it, happened this way.

Happy and content in his hometown of Aurora, Minnesota, Cork O'Connor has left his badge behind and is ready for a life of relative peace, setting up shop as a private investigator. But his newfound state of calm is soon interrupted when Henry Meloux, the Ojibwe medicine man and Cork's spiritual adviser, makes a request: Will Cork find the son that Henry fathered long ago?

With little to go on, Cork uses his investigative skills to locate Henry Wellington, a wealthy and reclusive industrialist living in Thunder Bay, Ontario. When a murder attempt is made on old Meloux's life, all clues point north across the border. But why would Wellington want his father dead? This question takes Cork on a journey through time as he unravels the story of Meloux's 1920s adventure in the ore-rich wilderness of Canada, where his love for a beautiful woman, far outside his culture, led him into a trap of treachery, greed, and murder.

The past and present collide along the rocky shores of Thunder Bay, where a father's unconditional love is tested by a son's deeply felt resentment, and where jealousy and revenge remain the code among men. As Cork hastens to uncover the truth and save his friend, he soon discovers that his own life is in danger and is reminded that the promises we keep - even for the best of friends - can sometimes place us in the hands of our worst enemies.

Publishers Weekly

The deftly plotted seventh Cork O'Connor novel represents a return to top form for Anthony-winner Krueger after 2006's disappointing Copper River. Henry Meloux asks Cork, who's now working as a part-time PI in his hometown of Aurora, Minn., to find a son the aged Ojibwe healer has never met from a relationship with a white woman, Maria Lima, "seventy-three winters" earlier. Armed with just two clues, a location in Canada and a gold watch with a picture of Maria, O'Connor soon finds the son, a retired mining entrepreneur, but arranging a meeting between son and father proves to be a challenging and surprisingly dangerous task. The book's middle third focuses on Meloux's past: how he became a guide for white men looking for gold in Canada, how he met and fell in love with one of their daughters, and the events that separated the young lovers. Despite the preponderance of back story, the action builds to a violent and satisfying denouement. (July)