My quick first
thought about this book was that Kent Krueger now shares a useful symbol with Louise
Penny. Both writers have prominently focused on wolves in their recent work. Krueger’s
God’s Country draws directly from Indigenous people’s legends that tell
of the lupine pressures present in all humans. There are good wolves, but they
have a hard time dealing with the disorientation spread by the evil ones. And
that is what Krueger’s central character, Cork O’Connor, faces in this book.
Cork’s son and his grandson have visions of an evil wolf
eating the heart of their father/grandfather at the opening of the story. In
spite of these warnings, Krueger has O’Connor continue to schedule a trip with them
into Minnesota’s beautiful, remote, and dangerous Boundary Waters. The party is
not on the trail long before blood is found near a tree. Then the group’s
satellite phone has an accidental and fatal tumble into the evening campfire.
If there ever was a more obvious set-up for future disaster, I am pressed to
come up with it.
The family members are sent back home the following morning to
report on what appears to be dangerous goings-on just ahead of them. Whoever
they are, they are leaving a trail of cigar wrappers, food waste, unquenched
campfires, and potential death. Cork stays to pursue the possible evil and
shortly finds himself marooned with two murderous brothers searching for a treasure
concealed by their father some years before.
Because the setup is so obvious and the violence so graphic,
I can’t bring myself to call this a defining work of moral conflict, but it's
still an awful good, suspense-filled yarn. Krueger’s descriptions of the
Boundary Waters, along with his mastery of survival skills, have not deserted
him. My only quibble is that he does seem to be repeating similar plots rather
than moving off in newer directions. There is danger in “them their woods.”
I give it a 4 out of five.
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