After 16 novels chronicling the adventures, heartbreak and spiritual explorations of Northern Minnesota's part-Ojibwe sheriff-turned-private-eye Corcoran O'Connor, readers might be ready to declare enough of a good thing, right?
But for those who have followed these progressive stories from prizewinning Twin Cities author William Kent Krueger, it's hard to get too much of Cork O'Connor. If his loyal spirit, derring-do, Iron Range ruggedness and protect-my-people nature don't hook you, an irresistible story line will.
In "Desolation Mountain," the O'Connors — Cork, grown daughter Jenny, Indian wife Rainy and sensitive and spiritual son Stephen — take center stage in a hotblooded story of a dead senator, dark government plots, a bitter dispute over a planned copper mine near sacred waters, and a mystical Ojibwe peak.
The dramatic setting is Desolation Mountain, a rugged rise of earth that towers above the forests and lakes of Minnesota's Iron Range. It's a place that holds deep spiritual meaning to the Ojibwe, one full of menace and darkness. A cursed place.
The mountain comes to young Stephen in a terrible recurring vision of himself, or a boy much like him, shooting an eagle out of the sky. His shame at killing such a sacred creature keeps him blocked from unraveling what the rest of the dream might mean.
The vision soon makes tragic sense. A plane containing a senator friendly to Indian interests and in line for the White House (a thinly veiled female version of Paul Wellstone) crashes on Desolation Mountain in a storm, killing the senator and her family. The government immediately blames the crash on pilot error, but the local Ojibwe search-and-rescuers first to the scene believe otherwise. And then they start disappearing.
Making a reappearance to covertly investigate the crash is Cork's former Secret Service buddy, Bo Thorson. Bo is now working among some dark government interests to recover the black box from the plane.
Krueger keeps up the tension and mystery in this, the 17th Cork O'Connor novel, partly through his comfort with real places — Iron Range towns, Iron Lake and other familiar treasures. He uses them to develop an uncanny sense of place and purpose; we can almost smell the pines and see the reflection of the moon on a cold lake.
