Lightning Strike

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.