United States
![William Kent Krueger - [object Object] author](https://res.cloudinary.com/readsomnia/image/upload/authors/a_a_william_kent_krueger.jpg)
Fox Creek: A Novel (19) (Cork O'Connor Mystery Series)
The latest in the New York Times bestselling Cork O'Connor Mystery Series from the "master storyteller" (Kristin Hannah, #1 New York Times bestselling author) follows Cork in a race against time to save his wife, a mysterious stranger, and an Ojibwe healer from bloodthirsty mercenaries.
The ancient Ojibwe healer Henry Meloux has had a vision of his death. As he walks the Northwoods in solitude, he tries to prepare himself peacefully for the end of his long life. But peace is destined to elude him as hunters fill the woods seeking a woman named Dolores Morriseau, a stranger who had come to the healer for shelter and the gift of his wisdom.
Meloux guides this stranger and his great niece, Cork O'Connor's wife, to safety deep into the Boundary Waters, his home for more than a century. On the last journey he may ever take into this beloved land, Meloux must do his best to outwit the deadly mercenaries who follow.
Meanwhile, in Aurora, Cork works feverishly to identify the hunters and the reason for their relentless pursuit, but he has little to go on. Desperate, Cork begins tracking the killers but his own skills as a hunter are severely tested by nightfall and a late season snowstorm. He knows only too well that with each passing hour time is running out. But his fiercest enemy in this deadly game of cat and mouse may well be his own deep self-doubt about his ability to save those he loves.
From "an author who never disappoints" (Bookreporter), this is another gripping and richly told addition to a masterful series.
The ancient Ojibwe healer Henry Meloux has had a vision of his death. As he walks the Northwoods in solitude, he tries to prepare himself peacefully for the end of his long life. But peace is destined to elude him as hunters fill the woods seeking a woman named Dolores Morriseau, a stranger who had come to the healer for shelter and the gift of his wisdom.
Meloux guides this stranger and his great niece, Cork O'Connor's wife, to safety deep into the Boundary Waters, his home for more than a century. On the last journey he may ever take into this beloved land, Meloux must do his best to outwit the deadly mercenaries who follow.
Meanwhile, in Aurora, Cork works feverishly to identify the hunters and the reason for their relentless pursuit, but he has little to go on. Desperate, Cork begins tracking the killers but his own skills as a hunter are severely tested by nightfall and a late season snowstorm. He knows only too well that with each passing hour time is running out. But his fiercest enemy in this deadly game of cat and mouse may well be his own deep self-doubt about his ability to save those he loves.
From "an author who never disappoints" (Bookreporter), this is another gripping and richly told addition to a masterful series.
Editorial Reviews
"This genuinely thrilling and atmospheric novel brims with characters who are easy to root for."-The New York Times Book Review
"As usual in a Krueger novel, the prose is elegant, the landscape of Minnesota's northeastern triangle is vividly portrayed, the character development is superb, and Henry's Native American mysticism is treated with understanding and respect." -The Washington Post
"From Iron Lake - the first in the Cork O'Connor series - to Fox Creek, Krueger has exhibited a mastery and control that can't be denied. Maybe he should start calling himself an alchemist, because he has the formula down to an art." -St. Louis Post Dispatch
"With its quick pacing and multi-layered plot, William Kent Krueger's Fox Creek dazzles early, sucking readers in, before giving way to a heart-thumping final act that delivers one hell of a reading experience." -The Real Book Spy
"Krueger has exhibited a mastery and control that can't be denied. Maybe he should start calling himself an alchemist, because he has the formula down to an art." -Minneapolis Star-Tribune
"Fox Creek is the best book in the series yet." -Star Tribune (Minneapolis)
"Outstanding… skillfully blends an evocative look at nature's beauty and peril with Native American lore…fans will be enthralled."-Publisher's Weekly (starred review)
"One of those rare authors who combines intricately plotted, issue-oriented stories with mysticism and action. A must for fans of beautifully written crime." -Library Journal (starred review)
"As usual in a Krueger novel, the prose is elegant, the landscape of Minnesota's northeastern triangle is vividly portrayed, the character development is superb, and Henry's Native American mysticism is treated with understanding and respect." -The Washington Post
"From Iron Lake - the first in the Cork O'Connor series - to Fox Creek, Krueger has exhibited a mastery and control that can't be denied. Maybe he should start calling himself an alchemist, because he has the formula down to an art." -St. Louis Post Dispatch
"With its quick pacing and multi-layered plot, William Kent Krueger's Fox Creek dazzles early, sucking readers in, before giving way to a heart-thumping final act that delivers one hell of a reading experience." -The Real Book Spy
"Krueger has exhibited a mastery and control that can't be denied. Maybe he should start calling himself an alchemist, because he has the formula down to an art." -Minneapolis Star-Tribune
"Fox Creek is the best book in the series yet." -Star Tribune (Minneapolis)
"Outstanding… skillfully blends an evocative look at nature's beauty and peril with Native American lore…fans will be enthralled."-Publisher's Weekly (starred review)
"One of those rare authors who combines intricately plotted, issue-oriented stories with mysticism and action. A must for fans of beautifully written crime." -Library Journal (starred review)
Readers Top Reviews
Judith Garrett FordK
I love the union of the human spirit and the spirit of nature that always fills the Cork O'Connor mysteries. It is always so good to have a reunion of these characters and to live another mystery story in the north woods and boundary waters with Cork, Henry and everyone else so dear to the heart. A very satisfying read
Peregrino
I discovered William Kent Krueger a year ago during Covid and fell in love with his stories and the complicated and delightful characters and the beauty of the MN country . I particularly enjoy how he has woven into his stories the wisdom of the native tribes and their deep connection with the wilderness. Since then I have devoured every one of his books. Fox Creek was one of his best. Treat yourself to am amazing American writer.
Eileen Goudge
I became hooked on the Cork O’Connor series after reading Book One. I’ve read every book in the series since and eagerly awaited this one. I was not disappointed. Fox Creek is a worthy follow-up to the previous books of the series, featuring beloved favorite characters and introducing intriguing new ones. It involves a flight through the wilderness, a vast government plot spanning both sides of the U.S.-Canadian border, murder, and attempted kidnapping. An absorbing read. I couldn’t put it down.
B. Schaaf
Fox Creek might be the best book in the Cork O’Connor series so far. I’ve read them all and the pacing and switching between points of view in this book drew me in even more than before. Fans of William Kent Krueger’s earlier works will love the familiar characters, but new readers will find that this book stands on its own as well. Fox Creek takes place mainly in and around Aurora, Minnesota, a fictional town near the Boundary Waters Wilderness. There is no shortage of action as Cork, his family, and his friends try to nail down a new mystery that has visited their lives. With trips to suburban Minneapolis and into Canada, the action kept me turning pages well past my bedtime and I highly recommend this a book to all mystery lovers. Even though I have enjoyed all of Krueger’s past novels, after reading Fox Creek I intend to go back and read the entire Cork O’Connor series again. I look forward to the 20th in the series, hopefully coming in 2023! Thank you to Atria Books and Netgalley for giving me the opportunity to read and review an advance copy of this book.
J. D. Webb
It’s well worth the wait. Finally, Fox Creek is here, and I happily immersed myself back into the beautiful Minnesota woods. This is a mixture of mystery and thriller. Each character tells the story from their perspective. So glad Henry Meloux, a one-hundred-year-old native American, is finally a prominent part of Fox Creek. Henry flees a gang of much younger men bent on capturing the woman he is guiding. They are chased into the deep woods on foot. Henry’s outlook on life is simple and pure inspiration. Cork O’Connor, now a private investigator, is asked by a prospective client to find his missing wife. Finding out that the man is a fraud and fearing the worst for Henry, Cork follows them into the woods where escape is seemingly impossible. All this with a countdown to an international catastrophe. Fox Creek is a perfect continuation of the Cork O’Connor story. So nice to feel the cold and snow in hot August. Reserve time to binge-read for this one.
Short Excerpt Teaser
Prologue PROLOGUE
He's an old man, with more than a century of living behind him. When he rises each morning, there is no part of his body that doesn't feel the weight, the ache, the wear of all those years. Although he moves more slowly now, he still unceasingly walks the forests with which he has been in intimate communion since he was a boy, spends full days alone in the great North Woods. His disappearances have become a cause for concern among those who care about him, and there are many, not only on the Iron Lake Reservation but also in the town of Aurora and across much of Tamarack County, Minnesota. When he returns from a long absence and sees the worry on their faces, he smiles and asks, "What are you afraid of?" Their answers are vague fears for his safety. "If I lie down somewhere on a soft bed of pine needles and begin my journey into the next world without a chance for you to say goodbye, you can always burn tobacco and send me your prayers. I will hear," he promises.
His body is a thin wall between this world and that which awaits him beyond, but sometimes his spirit travels between these two worlds. He has occasionally flown like an eagle and seen from a high place his own body lying as if lifeless under a canopy of pine boughs. He understands his death is an experience neither to fear nor to welcome. It is simply a place toward which he has been walking since the moment of his birth.
The world around him is one that has both showered him in delight and presented him with enormous challenge. The delight has always been in nature, in the beauty it has offered, the solace, the lessons, the wisdom, the healing, the communion of spirits. The challenge has been of the human kind. At the hands of human beings, he has experienced cruelty, pain, deceit, avarice, jealousy, hate. Most of his life he has been a healer, working in the ways of the natural world to help guide others to a place of harmony, what his people, the Anishinaabeg, call mino-bimaadiziwin, the way of the good life. It is the purpose to which he was born.
But he feels the pull of another calling now, one that despite his age and knowledge and wisdom he doesn't understand. It is a dark calling, melancholy and unsettling. As he walks the woods in the communion of spirits, he asks for answers, which have not come. Patience has always been his grounding, but he feels himself growing restless and uncertain. He feels he is being followed, but not by anything human. Death is his shadow. The prospect of his own death isn't what troubles him. It is the sense that death will come to others, come far too early in their journey through this world. What the old man, this ancient soul, is trying to understand is this: Am I the one who stands between death and the others, or am I the one who leads death to them?
Chapter 1 CHAPTER 1
It's after the lunch rush, and the man at the window orders a Sam's Special, large fries, and a chocolate shake, a pretty standard request. But while he waits, alone now that the line has dwindled to nothing, he jabbers on about this and that, then finally asks the question as if he hasn't been working up to it all along: "You're a private investigator, right?"
The man is a stranger, a face Cork O'Connor can't recall ever having seen in Tamarack County before, and Cork is good at remembering faces.
"I have a license. But mostly, I flip burgers. On the whole, I find it safer." Cork slides the bag containing the burger and fries across the window counter, then hands the man the shake. "That'll be nine seventy-five."
The man takes a ten from his shiny wallet, gives it to Cork, and says, "Keep the change." He stands looking at the bag and the shake, shifting a little on his feet, and finally comes out with it. "I need your help."
"The kind that requires a PI license?"
"Yeah. That kind."
"I'll meet you at the door."
Cork turns to his son, Stephen, who is scraping the charred grease from the lunch rush off the grill. Cork's son is twenty-one, average height and build, but his Ojibwe heritage is evident in the dark brown of his eyes, the near black of his hair, and the prominence of his cheekbones. More than any of Cork's children, he displays his Anishinaabe ancestry.
"Watch the window," Cork says.
Stephen nods, and Cork leaves the prep area and walks to the rear of Sam's Place.
It's an old Quonset hut, circa World War Two, which an Ojibwe man named Sam Winter Moon, long deceased, converted into a burger joint at the edge of Iron Lake, on the outskirts of Aurora, a small town deep in the great Northwoods of Minnesota, a stone's throw from the Canadian border. The front of the Quonse...
He's an old man, with more than a century of living behind him. When he rises each morning, there is no part of his body that doesn't feel the weight, the ache, the wear of all those years. Although he moves more slowly now, he still unceasingly walks the forests with which he has been in intimate communion since he was a boy, spends full days alone in the great North Woods. His disappearances have become a cause for concern among those who care about him, and there are many, not only on the Iron Lake Reservation but also in the town of Aurora and across much of Tamarack County, Minnesota. When he returns from a long absence and sees the worry on their faces, he smiles and asks, "What are you afraid of?" Their answers are vague fears for his safety. "If I lie down somewhere on a soft bed of pine needles and begin my journey into the next world without a chance for you to say goodbye, you can always burn tobacco and send me your prayers. I will hear," he promises.
His body is a thin wall between this world and that which awaits him beyond, but sometimes his spirit travels between these two worlds. He has occasionally flown like an eagle and seen from a high place his own body lying as if lifeless under a canopy of pine boughs. He understands his death is an experience neither to fear nor to welcome. It is simply a place toward which he has been walking since the moment of his birth.
The world around him is one that has both showered him in delight and presented him with enormous challenge. The delight has always been in nature, in the beauty it has offered, the solace, the lessons, the wisdom, the healing, the communion of spirits. The challenge has been of the human kind. At the hands of human beings, he has experienced cruelty, pain, deceit, avarice, jealousy, hate. Most of his life he has been a healer, working in the ways of the natural world to help guide others to a place of harmony, what his people, the Anishinaabeg, call mino-bimaadiziwin, the way of the good life. It is the purpose to which he was born.
But he feels the pull of another calling now, one that despite his age and knowledge and wisdom he doesn't understand. It is a dark calling, melancholy and unsettling. As he walks the woods in the communion of spirits, he asks for answers, which have not come. Patience has always been his grounding, but he feels himself growing restless and uncertain. He feels he is being followed, but not by anything human. Death is his shadow. The prospect of his own death isn't what troubles him. It is the sense that death will come to others, come far too early in their journey through this world. What the old man, this ancient soul, is trying to understand is this: Am I the one who stands between death and the others, or am I the one who leads death to them?
Chapter 1 CHAPTER 1
It's after the lunch rush, and the man at the window orders a Sam's Special, large fries, and a chocolate shake, a pretty standard request. But while he waits, alone now that the line has dwindled to nothing, he jabbers on about this and that, then finally asks the question as if he hasn't been working up to it all along: "You're a private investigator, right?"
The man is a stranger, a face Cork O'Connor can't recall ever having seen in Tamarack County before, and Cork is good at remembering faces.
"I have a license. But mostly, I flip burgers. On the whole, I find it safer." Cork slides the bag containing the burger and fries across the window counter, then hands the man the shake. "That'll be nine seventy-five."
The man takes a ten from his shiny wallet, gives it to Cork, and says, "Keep the change." He stands looking at the bag and the shake, shifting a little on his feet, and finally comes out with it. "I need your help."
"The kind that requires a PI license?"
"Yeah. That kind."
"I'll meet you at the door."
Cork turns to his son, Stephen, who is scraping the charred grease from the lunch rush off the grill. Cork's son is twenty-one, average height and build, but his Ojibwe heritage is evident in the dark brown of his eyes, the near black of his hair, and the prominence of his cheekbones. More than any of Cork's children, he displays his Anishinaabe ancestry.
"Watch the window," Cork says.
Stephen nods, and Cork leaves the prep area and walks to the rear of Sam's Place.
It's an old Quonset hut, circa World War Two, which an Ojibwe man named Sam Winter Moon, long deceased, converted into a burger joint at the edge of Iron Lake, on the outskirts of Aurora, a small town deep in the great Northwoods of Minnesota, a stone's throw from the Canadian border. The front of the Quonse...
