Works by
William Kent Krueger
(Writer)

Cork O'Connor Mystery Series

1. Iron Lake (1998)
   Part Irish, part Anishinaabe Indian, Corcoran "Cork" O'Connor is the former sheriff of Aurora, Minnesota (population 3,752). Embittered over losing his job as a cop and over the marital meltdown that has separated him from his wife and children, Cork gets by on heavy doses of caffeine, nicotine, and guilt. Once a cop on Chicago's South Side, there's not much that can shock him. But when a powerful local politician is brutally murdered the same night a young Indian boy goes missing, Cork takes on a harrowing case of corruption, conspiracy, and scandal.
   
   As a blizzard buries Aurora and an old medicine man warns of the arrival of a blood-thirsty mythic beast called the Windigo, Cork must dig for answers hard and fast before more people, among them those he loves, will die.

2. Boundary Waters (1999)
   The Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness: more than two million acres of forest, white-water rapids, and uncharted islands along the American/Canadian border. Somewhere in the heart of this unforgiving territory, a young woman named Shiloh, a country-western singer at the height of her career, has disappeared. Her father arrives in Aurora, Minnesota to hire former sheriff Cork O'Connor to find her. Cork joins a search party that includes an ex-con, two FBI agents, and a ten-year-old boy. But there are others on Shiloh's trail as well, men hired not just to find her, but to kill her.
   
   As the expedition ventures deeper in the wilderness, winter falls hard, and Cork's team of searchers loses contact with civilization. Like the brutal winds of a Minnesota blizzard, death—violent and sudden—stalks them.

3. Purgatory Ridge (2001)
   An explosion at a lumber mill rips the heart right out of a beautiful summer morning and kills the traditional chief of the Iron Lake Ojibwe. Cork O'Connor, former sheriff of Tamarack County, Minnesota, finds himself caught once again in a battle between the two cultures of his heritage-White and Indian. Although a rogue environmentalist known as Eco-Warrior claims responsibility for the bombing, Cork isn't so sure, and he can't help investigating.
   
   Many in Tamarack County blame the Ojibwe who are trying to save a stand of sacred white pines from being logged. The Ojibwe blame the greed of Karl Lindstrom, the man who owns the mill. But is there a more brutal darkness behind these events, one that Cork can't possibly imagine, a hunger for revenge that threatens more than just the peace of a small town?
   
   As tensions mount, and Cork desperately tears at layers of deceit, he begins to understand that the real prey may be the people loves most and that their greatest enemy is time.

4. The Devil's Bed (2003)
   An escaped mental patient targets the First Lady of the United States for assassination. Although he doesn't realize it, he will be aided in his murderous plan by some of the most powerful people in the federal government. The only thing that stands between the First Lady and certain death is the Secret Service agent who loves her...

5. Blood Hollow (2004)
   When the corpse of a teenage girl is discovered on a hillside three months after her disappearance on New Year's Eve, all evidence points to her boyfriend, Solemn Winter Moon. Despite Solemn's self-incriminating decision to go into hiding, Cork O'Connor, Aurora's part-Irish, part-Ojibwe former sheriff, isn't about to hang the crime on the kid, whom O'Connor is convinced is innocent. In an uphill battle to clear Solemn's name, Cork encounters no shortage of adversity. Some he knows all too well—small-town bigotry and bureaucracy foremost among them. What Cork isn't prepared for is the emergence of a long-held resentment hailing from his own childhood. And when Solemn reappears, claiming to have seen a vision of Jesus Christ in Blood Hollow, the mystery becomes thornier than Cork could ever have anticipated. And that's when the miracles start happening...

6. Mercy Falls (2005)
   Copper River finds Cork O'Connor running for his life from professional hit men who have already put a bullet through his leg. Desperate, he finds sanctuary outside a small town called Bodine on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in an old resort owned by his cousin, Jewell DuBois. Though Jewell, a bitter widow whose husband may have been killed by cops, keeps Cork at arm's length, her fourteen-year-old son, Ren, is looking for a friend. But being a father figure to Ren will prove more difficult than Cork could possibly imagine...

7. Copper River (2006)
   Copper River finds Cork O'Connor running for his life from professional hit men who have already put a bullet through his leg. Desperate, he finds sanctuary outside a small town called Bodine on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in an old resort owned by his cousin, Jewell DuBois. Though Jewell, a bitter widow whose husband may have been killed by cops, keeps Cork at arm's length, her fourteen-year-old son, Ren, is looking for a friend. But being a father figure to Ren will prove more difficult than Cork could possibly imagine...

8. Thunder Bay (2007)
   The promise, as I remember it, happened this way.
   
   With these words, Cork O'Connor begins the story of a promise he will always regret. Happy and content in his hometown of Aurora, Minnesota, he 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 adventures 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...