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What a great find this book was! I'd never heard of the series or the author but when one of my book groups chose this series as a group read this year I decided to give it a try. The story introduces our main protagonist, Corcoran "Cork" O'Connor during a not so great time in his life. Half-Irish and half American Indian, Cork is the former Sheriff of a small town in northern Minnesota but both his professional and personal lives have hit the skids in the year, give or take a few months, preceding the start of the story. But when a prominent and politically powerful judge is found dead in his home and a local boy goes missing, Cork can't shake the feeling that things don't quite add up and the more he digs into the matter the more questions and dead bodies he encounters.

I was sucked into Cork's world almost immediately. The characters felt like real people and I had pretty definite feelings about almost all of them, though those feelings shifted from one extreme to the other - and sometimes back again - over the course of the story. Cork made for a great protagonist: middle aged, not particularly handsome, not in possession of a ripped body, and a little world weary. Life has beaten him down a bit but it hasn't turned him into a grade "A" douchebag. He's still a caring man, a good friend, and a great father to his children. I was as drawn into the drama of his personal life as I was to the murder cases. The northern setting was also wonderfully presented on the page. I could almost feel the frigid wind, the snow, and the single digit temperatures.

Cork's unofficial investigation into the death of the judge was made all the more interesting since he's not bound by the constraints of a law enforcement officer anymore. Now his lack of legal authority might raise the question of why anyone should feel the necessity to answer any of his questions and that'd be a fair point. But the town still has plenty of people who respect Cork's abilities and opinions, including the current county Sheriff, so this didn't bother me.

This was a well plotted and evenly paced story that kept building momentum from the first page to the last. As I mentioned earlier, both the investigation and the personal life stuff had me invested so there was never really any part that dragged or seemed uninteresting to me. There were one or two things about some of the reveals that seemed to push at the limits of believability but ultimately these in no way diminished my enjoyment of the book. Though this is a new to me author, I will certainly be reading the rest of this series. After the events of this book, I'm very curious to see what happens next for Corcoran O'Connor.