Lightning Strike

March 1, 2021

In multi-award-winning Andrews's Murder Most Fowl, Meg Langslow's husband is directing a production of Macbeth even as gung-ho reenactors erect an authentic medieval Scottish military camp nearby, which ends in the murder of the unpleasant filmmaker documenting the reenactment (40,000-copy first printing). A BAFTA and multiple mystery award winner, novelist/filmmaker Claudel limns the current refugee crisis, with the inhabitants of backwater Dog Island refusing to disrupt their age-old way of life when three unidentified bodies wash ashore, deciding instead to bury them. In Edgar Award winner Hirahara's 1944-set Clark and Division, 20-year-old Aki, who has moved with her parents to Chicago after their release from the Manzanar concentration camp in California, refuses to believe that her sister Rose's death is a suicide. Lightning Strike, a prequel to Krueger's "Cork O'Connor" series, features Cork's coming-of age in small-town 1963 Minnesota. In Muller's Ice and Stone, durable PI Sharon McCone is enlisted by the organization Crimes Against Indigenous Sisters when two more Indigenous women are brutally dispatched in what the police refuse to regard as a pattern (25,000-copy first printing). The Madness of Crowds, the next in Penny's sensational "Chief Inspector Gamache" series, sends the chief inspector home to Three Pines, Canada, after a sojourn in Paris. Following Trinchieri's well-received debut, Murder in Chianti, The Bitter Taste of Murder finds former NYPD Nico Doyle comfortably settled in his late wife's Tuscan hometown--until the ruthless wine critic who's just arrived is murdered.

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June 14, 2021
At the start of bestseller Krueger’s suspenseful 18th mystery, a prequel, featuring former sheriff turned PI Cork O’Connor (after 2018’s Desolation Mountain), 12-year-old Cork, who’s one-quarter Ojibwe, makes a horrifying discovery while hiking one day in 1963 in Minnesota’s Superior National Forest—the hanged corpse of Big John Manydeeds, the uncle of a friend of Cork’s from the Iron Lake Reservation. With no signs of foul play, the death is quickly ruled a suicide, especially after evidence is found that Big John, a recovering alcoholic, had fallen off the wagon. Cork’s father, the Tamarack County sheriff, adopts that conclusion, but Cork isn’t so sure, especially after seeing an apparition he believes might be the dead man’s troubled spirit at the place where Big John died. He investigates, ultimately convincing his father that the case may be a homicide and that it’s reasonable to look into those with a possible murder motive. Krueger makes the youthful version of his lead plausible, as well as his detective abilities. Longtime fans will relish Cork’s rich backstory. Agent: Danielle Egan-Miller, Brown & Miller Literary Assoc.

Starred review from July 1, 2021

This prequel to Krueger's "Cork O'Connor" series begins in January 1989. Cork, the newly elected sheriff of Tamarack County, MN, reflects on the case that changed his relationship with his father in the summer of 1963, when Cork was 12. In '63, his father Liam is the sheriff; when Cork finds the hanging body of Big John Manydeeds, Liam investigates. Liam is pulled between Tamarack County's white residents, who think Manydeeds was drunk and killed himself, and the county's Ojibwe residents, who don't believe that Manydeeds, who was Ojibwe, died by suicide. Liam searches for logical answers, while Cork grapples with questions about death and witnesses a shadow that haunts the Lightning Strike site where Manydeeds was found. Cork, who is one-quarter Ojibwe, finds spiritual answers and provides clues to his white father, who will always be an outsider in the county. Anger is the only response for a 12-year-old when his father's decisions seem to put community before family. VERDICT This sensitive, moving prequel introduces and draws readers into the series. Krueger (Ordinary Grace; This Tender Land) has written another perceptive coming-of-age novel, the poignant story of a father and son trying to understand each other. It provides Cork O'Connor's backstory for those who haven't read the series.--Lesa Holstine, Evansville Vanderburgh P.L., IN

Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.