Vermilion Drift

This is Krueger's tenth novel featuring Cork O'Connor, a rural Minnesota P.I. who is half-Ojibwa Indian. A group of bodies is found in an abandoned iron mine; they may be connected to a decades-old series of people gone missing. But among those bodies is a week-old murder victim killed with the same gun that killed one of the earlier victims. The story has lots of taciturn characters from Minnesota/Michigan's Upper Peninsula, along with many native Ojibwa. Buck Schirner does an outstanding job with the distinctive accents and idiomatic usages of the region. His talent for rendering dialects in a totally believable manner makes this a superior performance. His pacing is also spot-on for the many complex characters in this convoluted story. M.C. (c) AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine

Starred review from July 19, 2010
At the start of Krueger's superlative 10th novel featuring Tamarack County, Minn., PI Cork O'Connor (after Heaven's Keep), mining heir Max Cavanagh hires Cork to trace his missing sister, Lauren, founder of an artists' retreat—and to try to identify the sender of threatening letters to various people connected with Vermilion One, a Cavanaugh family mine, which the U.S. Department of Energy is considering for long-term nuclear waste storage. When Cork and a mine official descend into Vermilion One, they discover six bodies, five of them skeletal, which may be connected with a decades-old unsolved series of crimes known as "the Vanishings," which Cork's father looked into when he was sheriff. The sixth corpse, that of a well-dressed woman, appears to have been in the mine about a week. Rock-solid prose combines with effective characterizations and a logical if complex plot for a thrilling read. This book succeeds on every level and ought to attract the author a deservingly wide readership.