In a perfect display of a not-unreasonable NIMBY mindset [Not In My Backyard}, most of the residents of Tamarack County, Minnesota and the surrounding Iron Lake area are up in arms, almost literally, when plans are announced to consider converting the long-closed [and fictional] Vermilion Mine to a nuclear waste site. In the midst of the protests arising out of this plan, Cork O’Connor is hired by Max Cavanaugh to find his sister. Max says she has been missing for a week. Describing her as “flamboyant” and “like sunshine if it had a voice,” he begs Cork, former Tamarack County Sheriff [as was his father before him] and, now in his early 50′s, working as a p.i., to find her. No ransom demand has been received, as might have been expected if it was a kidnapping – the family had founded the Great North Mining Company in 1887 and the name was synonymous with iron mining and wealth. But Lauren Cavanaugh was known to take off for distant places, both in the US and outside of the country, whenever the spirit moved her, complicating matters.
Cork’s mind and heart, as the book opens, are still filled with grief over this wife’s murder a little over a year before, as well as recent and pervasive nightmares regarding his father’s death over forty years ago. When the investigation into the whereabouts of the missing woman leads to a shocking discovery, the ensuing events lead Cork right back to that exact time period. Coming as it does at a time when he is particularly vulnerable, with his beloved Jo dead and his 3 kids away from the nest, he thinks. “With Jo gone and the kids away, what held him to this place was history. And what was history but memory? And of what value, in the end, was a memory? A man’s life needed to be made of stuff more immediate and substantial. Cork wondered what that was for him now.” By the end of the novel, Cork and the reader find an answer to that enigma. The Indian culture [Cork is part Ojibwe], as always, is an integral part of this 10th entry in the series, as is the North Country itself, in all its endangered glory.
Highly recommended.
