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[7/10]

Conscience was a devil that plagued the individual. Collectively, a people squashed it as easily as stepping on a daisy.
Or so it appeared to Corcoran O’Connor on that summer morning when smoke hazed the sky and Tamarack County seemed poised for war over the destruction of one of the last good stands of old-growth white pine left in the North Woods.

I’m back in Tamarack County, following the exploits of former Sheriff Cork O’Connor, reading book three in the series after reading book four due to my own damn flimsy memory. Still, reading the novels in chronological order is optional, since each one presents a more or less completed criminal investigation while it fleshes out the personality of the lead character, of his family and friends and, in general, of the rural community of north Minnesota.

I have decided to continue with the series after an excellent first episode mostly for the setting and for the prose of William Kent Krueger and not for the crime thriller format, which in the end, is not all that special, in particular with this third episode that feels more than a little forced, contrived.

Math and science could be applied in concrete ways. Literature, if it didn’t enlighten, at least entertained. But history? History was simply a study in futility. Because people never learned. Century after century, they committed the same atrocities against one another or against the earth, and the only thing that changed was the magnitude of the slaughter.

The catalyst of this new conflict in the logging town of Aurora is not much different than the one from the first novel in the series. There, the fishing rights on Iron Lake led to bloody conflict between the Anishinaabe people and the local industry leaders. Now, in the name of progress, one of those local industrialists who recently returned home has won a government contract to cut in a preserved national forest. Somebody blows up equipment at one of his camps and immediately the Anishinaabe, who consider the grove of ancient pine trees sacred, are blamed. Cork is asked to work as a private investigator, to clear up the mess as a freelance agent. A parallel plot follows the personal vendetta of the sole survivor from the sinking of a coal freighter during a winter storm on the Great Lakes. Readers familiar with the genre might rightfully suspect that the two incidents are related, but the author does a pretty good job at muddying the waters (view spoiler)[ especially with a problematic kidnapping of a kid with diabetes, an illness which nobody seems to know about. This plot hole was actually explained by the end of the story, what I called contrived earlier is the way the author made Cork’s wife part of the kidnapping. (hide spoiler)]

As I have come to expect from a Krueger novel, the pacing is good, the characters are engaging, the tension is gradually ratcheted up to an explosive finale. I did have some problems with the “both sides are evil� argument when discussing nature preservation issues, and with a less than subtle religious tone. But it appears that Mr. Krueger considers it important to bear witness to his faith in each of his stories, and the more I read from him, the more evident it appears that miracles and faith in them form a huge part of his discourse. Such a miracle (or three) are also part of the current episode.

The title itself is actually very well chosen, with multiple interpretations both for LaPere the sailor who tries to atone for his failure to save his brother from drowning, and for Cork, who is in a personal purgatory after failing both his community and his family in the first book of the series. The longer I read about him, the more he begins to resemble a Saviour avatar for the town (view spoiler)[ book four, which I already read, will have Cork returning both to his Sheriff position and to his church (hide spoiler)]
As a bonus for rockhounds, this Purgatory Ridge is an actual geological feature on the Great Lakes, a place that seems worth a visit.

Will I continue reading these books? Probably, yes. Again, not so much for the crime part or for the religious angle, but for the experience of living so close to nature, a thing that mr. Krueger is really good at conveying.

Aurora, Minnesota, deep in the great North Woods, riding the jagged edge of the Iron Range, had not yet wakened. This was Cork’s favorite time of the day. Although he couldn’t actually see it, he could picture the whole town perfectly. Sunlight dripping down the houses on Gooseberry Lane like butter melting down pancakes. The streets empty and clean. The surface of Iron Lake on such a still morning looking solid as polished steel.
God, he loved this place.