Description
It’s been two years since William Kent Krueger’s last novel, This Tender Land. And it’s been three years since his last Cork O’Connor series title, Desolation Mountain. Lightning Strike combines the brilliance of the Cork O’Connor protagonist along with nostalgia and the delicate nature of history, family and “home” from 2019’s This Tender Land. Which is to say, this prequel to the Cork O’Connor story is a perfect storm of Krueger’s writing — intriguing, heartfelt and empathetic. We always feel good about life after reading a William Kent Krueger novel.
Aurora is a small town nestled in the ancient forest alongside the shores of Minnesota’s Iron Lake. In the summer of 1963, it is the whole world to twelve-year-old Cork O’Connor, its rhythms as familiar as his own heartbeat. But when Cork stumbles upon the body of a man he revered hanging from a tree in an abandoned logging camp, it is the first in a series of events that will cause him to question everything he took for granted about his hometown, his family, and himself.
Cork’s father, Liam O’Connor, is Aurora’s sheriff and it is his job to confirm that the man’s death was the result of suicide, as all the evidence suggests. In the shadow of his father’s official investigation, Cork begins to look for answers on his own. Together, father and son face the ultimate test of choosing between what their heads tell them is true and what their hearts know is right.
In this “brilliant achievement, and one every crime reader and writer needs to celebrate” (Louise Penny, #1 New York Times bestselling author), beloved novelist William Kent Krueger shows that some mysteries can be solved even as others surpass our understanding.
Number of pages: 400
Dimensions: 210 x 135 x 28 mm