Boundary Waters and Purgatory Ridge by William Kent Krueger

In 2017, I read Iron Lake by William Kent Kreuger.  At the time, I planned to continue the series, but never got around to it.

When I saw Spirit Crossing, the latest Cork O'Connor book on NetGalley, it was a reminder that I had never read the intervening books.  Spirit Crossing was excellent, and I have a review scheduled for later.  However, so much had happened in between Iron Lake and Spirit Crossing--I had missed so much of the lives and events of the characters.

It behooved me to go back and read book 2, Boundary Waters.  Good move, although I do wish I'd done it when I finished the first book.  

Boundary Waters has former sheriff Cork O'Connor of Aurora, Minnesota, living and working in the burger stand he inherited from his friend Sam Winter Moon.  When the father of a missing young woman comes to him for help, Cork reluctantly agrees to look for Shiloh, a country singer on the rise who has taken temporary refuge somewhere in the Boundary Waters.  Shiloh enlisted Wendell Two Knives to lead her into the wilderness where she planned to come to terms with her problems with drugs and alcohol and to some extent, the murder of her mother when she was a child, which still gives her nightmares. 

But there are others searching for Shiloh.  Two million acres of wilderness, weather, and someone wants to get to her before Cork and his crew.  Cork's main advantage is Louis, a young boy who had been to the cabin where Wendell Two Knives had taken Shiloh.  Without Louis, there would be no way to locate the young woman.  The bad guys are following them and don't mind leaving bodies along the way

I enjoyed it so much that I went straight into bk 3.

In northern Minnesota, among the vast wilderness of forests, is a stand of ancient great white pines called Our Grandfathers by the Ojibwe. When lumber mill owner Karl Lindstrom expects to gain the rights to cut them, he has both the Ojibwe and eco-activists protesting.

A few of the activists have reputations for criminal behaviors to stop logging in other areas, and when a bomb explodes in Lindstrom's mill killing an Ojibwe elder, the tensions grow on both sides.  Then someone calling himself Eco-Warrior claims credit for the bomb.

In a blended thread John LePere, the lone survivor of the sinking of the Alfred M. Teasdale in Lake Superior, has his own obsession.  When someone suggests that the sinking was deliberate, he finds himself wanting revenge.

The situations escalate in different ways involving past and present events, a kidnapping, and a forest fire.  

By the time, Spirit Crossing is published in August, I hope to have read more of the early books.  

For those who love writers whose writing draws you in, whose characters are complex, and whose plots keep you involved, I recommend Krueger's Cork O'Connor series.