BOUNDARY WATERS by William Kent Krueger

 

I found this gem in paperback at a used book sale.  It was originally published in 1999 and was the third in a now lengthy series of Cork O’Connor mysteries. Though the arrival of GPS and DNA testing invalidated two of the issues in this novel, the plot, the boundary waters setting, and the characters continue to ring true.     

O’Connor, as we meet him here, is a former county sheriff with a checkered matrimonial past living in the small northern Minnesota town of Aurora. He is drawn into the search for a young and famous pop western singer named Shiloh, who has gone missing in the Quetico-Superior Wilderness. The singer’s mother was a Native American who left town years before to find her future on the west coast.  She was subsequently brutally murdered ten years before the story opens and now the daughter, whose parentage is complicated, has returned to a solitary cabin in the deep woods and may possess memories that could solve the old murder.  O’Connor is hired to join a party of searchers composed of FBI agents, an older man who claims to be the girl’s father, and a local native American and his son.  They in turn are being tracked by a mysterious and cruel assassin. Shiloh, the part native American singer, who is the object of the search has luscious long black hair and Krueger's descriptions of her reminded me of a young Joan Baez.

There ensues a series of cat and mouse games on the remote forest trails and lakes punctuated by killings, narrow escapes, fascinating uses of native survival techniques, and a continued revealing of the complicated backstory that has plunged all of the characters into a “Deliverance” style adventure minus the banjo music.   

Krueger’s descriptions of the natural beauty, the climate, and the dangers of the boundary waters are first rate. His integration of these elements into the lives of the participants and the legends of the First Peoples who settled this area reveals both deep research and great compassion for native Americans.   

 The First People inhabitants bring with them the glorious voice of the Old Ways while emphasizing how the re-telling of those stories can merge the past and the future into a unified myth of survival. The ending ties up the threads but leaves more than enough on the spool to inhabit the several more Cork OConnor adventures that have come after this one.  The only caution I would have is that Krueger  writes out of the hard-hitting Mickey Spillane/Mike Hammer tradition and if you find physical and gun  violence disturbing, you may want to take a pass.    

I still give it a 4 out of 5