Together, father and son face the ultimate test of choosing between what their heads tell them is true and what their hearts know is right. In the shadow of his father’s official investigation, Cork begins to look for answers on his own.
LIGHTNING STRIKE BOOK SERIES
But when Cork stumbles upon the body of a man he revered hanging from a tree in an abandoned logging camp, it is the first in a series of events that will cause him to question everything he took for granted about his hometown, his family, and himself.Ĭork’s father, Liam O’Connor, is Aurora’s sheriff and it is his job to confirm that the man’s death was the result of suicide, as all the evidence suggests. In the summer of 1963, it is the whole world to twelve-year-old Cork O’Connor, its rhythms as familiar as his own heartbeat. You can read more about William Kent Kruger at this website.An instant New York Times bestseller, this prequel to the acclaimed Cork O’Connor series is “a pitch perfect, richly imagined story that is both an edge-of-your-seat thriller and an evocative, emotionally charged coming-of-age tale” ( Kristin Hannah, #1 New York Times bestselling author) about fathers and sons, small-town conflicts, and the events that shape our lives forever.Īurora is a small town nestled in the ancient forest alongside the shores of Minnesota’s Iron Lake. 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.
0 kommentar(er)
