8/7/2023 0 Comments Lightning strike bookAt that point, Cork is 12, lives with his parents in the small town of Aurora, and gets around mostly on his bike. He had barely settled into his new office before the reader is whisked back in time to when Cork’s father, Liam, served as sheriff. Protagonist, Cork O’Connor, part Ojibwe, is the new sheriff in Tamarack County in northern Minnesota, located close to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area. The book opens in 1989, but backtracks to 1963 where all the action takes place. It is a story I needed to hear right now, a story ripe with wisdom, touched by sorrow, and hopeful. It’s mostly a thriller who-done-it, which means the plot assumes the most importance, yet it’s also character-driven, introducing people who you will not forget. “Lightning Strike,” which has an equal number of Ojibwe and non-Indian characters, touches you in a way that lasts. He said this book was even better than Krueger’s highly acclaimed “This Tender Land.” Then he mailed it to my home.ĭear readers: my nightstand is six books high with recommended reading for Circle reviews. An acquaintance emailed that I just had to read the book, with a plot and characters set in northern Minnesota. The reading of “Lightning Strike” by Minnesota writer William Kent Krueger came about randomly. You can read more about William Kent Kruger at this website.“Lightning Strike” is published by Atria Books (Simon & Schuster), 2021. As always the author’s characters are completely believable, and the story will tug at your heartstrings. Lightning Strike is an outstanding mystery and a poignant novel. They tried blankets tainted with smallpox. It was, she tells him, “another attempt to eradicate the Native cultures. On paper it sounded good, Cork’s grandmother Dilsey tells him, but the reality was different. The author writes about the Relocation Act of 1956, an act of Congress that pays for relocation for Indians to encourage them to leave their reservations and move to locations where there are better schools and jobs. There are other threads in Lightning Strike in addition to Big John’s death, including a missing teenage Native girl and the feelings of Natives after they leave the reservation. With MacDermid on one side and Liam’s mother-in-law on the other, every move the sheriff makes alienates one of the groups. He has a virulent dislike of Indians and a violent temper, something his abused wife can attest to. One of the most vociferous voices raised against Natives in general and Big John in particular is Duncan MacDermid. They have lost belief, if they ever had it, in Liam’s trustworthiness and ability to conduct an impartial investigation. To them the sheriff is just another chimook, a white man, without understanding or reverence for Ojibwe customs and beliefs, even though he is married to Colleen, the daughter of an Ojibwe mother and a white father. Not surprisingly, members of the tribe have little confidence in any form of the official government, even when the forensics report confirms that Big John was intoxicated when he died. However, that’s not enough for the Iron Lake Band of Ojibwe, living on a reservation just outside of Aurora and under the jurisdiction of the Tamarack County Sheriff’s office. So he asks for a toxicology report, “just to be on the safe side.” It looks like an open-and-shut suicide, but Liam wants to be sure. There is distrust in both cultures, and it all comes to a head when Cork O’Connor and his friend Jorge come upon the body of Big John hanging from a tree in the area called Lightning Strike on the shore of Iron Lake.īecause of Big John’s many battles with alcohol, the authorities aren’t too surprised that there are two empty bottles of Four Roses on the ground near his body, although “I thought he’d kick the booze for good,” Cork’s father, Sheriff Liam O’Connor, tells his two deputies and the mortician who come to Lightning Strike after Cork runs home with the news of his discovery. The area is home to its white, Christian population descended mainly from Irish and Scandinavian settlers and its Native Ojibwe people. Although there isn’t much in the way of major crime in the North Country, there are ethnic tensions that are either close to the surface or bubbling above it. It’s 1963 in the small town of Aurora, Minnesota. William Kent Krueger is one of the most lyrical authors around, a fact that he proves once again in Lightning Strike, a look back to the childhood of Cork O’Connor, the protagonist of many of his novels.
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