“You have returned to the scene of the crimes!” I cry, spying St. Paul writer William Kent Krueger, best-selling author of the 22 (and counting) Cork O’Connor mysteries, as well as a trio of award-winning books set in southern Minnesota, This Tender Land, Ordinary Grace, and The River We Remember, which critics often compare, in their emotion and urgency of moral questioning, to To Kill a Mockingbird.
“Some crimes,” he clarifies, in his particular way that is all at once intensely focused, a bit playful, and mild-mannered. Then he laughs and adjusts the flatcap that subtly nods him into the pantheon of American noir greats. We’re meeting at the Caribou on Larpenteur near Lexington in Roseville, at a front table that’s only a little wobbly—the selfsame table where Krueger wrote important scenes for a few of his books, in which bodies drop like flies and justice never comes swiftly enough or how you think it might.
Is Krueger Minnesota’s most successful murderer? He’s definitely number one in peppering the Northwoods with bodies and the snapping ricochet of gunfire, but now is the season to investigate this claim for yourself, not just because God’s Country, the 22nd Cork O’Connor novel, came out this August but because some very big-deal streaming-platform Hollywood types have recently been touring around the Arrowhead and North Shore with Krueger. If all goes well, Boundary Waters–adjacent Minnesota might just succeed Fargo as the 21st-century face of Northern crime, to feed our justice-in-the-snow-loving hearts…