Your usual chair at the table is unoccupied.
Down the hall, your bed’s still made; the blankets, straight. The noises you make, the scent of you, it’s all gone, missing from the places you should be. Will you return soon? Only you can be sure but, as in the new novel “Spirit Crossing” by William Kent Krueger, there are people hoping you will.
Annie O’Connor hadn’t wanted to come back home for anything but the family wedding that was a month away. She hadn’t wanted to leave Guatemala, though she spoke to her partner, Maria, about home in many warm ways. She wasn’t afraid that she’d encounter problems for being what the Anishinaabe called “Two-Spirits,” because her family was open and loving. No, Annie had another secret, and she didn’t know if she’d have time to tell it.
Like a lot of seven-year-olds, Corcoran O’Connor’s grandson, Waaboo (Ojibwenowin for “Little Rabbit”) was curious, active and smart. Unlike his contemporaries, however, Little Rabbit knew the spirit world, and so when he seemed to speak to spirits in the woods one afternoon, his grandfather paid attention – and Cork made a grisly discovery.
Daniel English, O’Connor’s son-in-law and Waboo’s father, worked as a tribal police officer and he’d been talking angrily about the large number of Native American girls who’d gone missing in northern Minnesota, and how the local police did little about it.
Case in point: the young woman who lay in a shallow grave in a blueberry patch.
Daniel believed – hoped – she was one of the Lakota girls he’d been searching for.
But Waboo said there were two girls whose spirits were lost. Was the other spirit that of Olivia Hamilton, a white girl whose father had money, and who the police were trying hard to find? Why were young women disappearing without a trace in northern Minnesota? And, as the county and tribal police got closer to a killer, why would someone want to murder a little boy who saw people that others could not see?
It’s been a long summer, and you’ve missed Cork O’Connor, haven’t you? Yep, so you’re good and ready for another installment, and “Spirit Crossing” will make you very happy.
As you’ve come to expect, author William Kent Krueger pulls readers into this novel in his O’Connor series quick and easy, with characters you can’t help but get involved with – including some of Krueger fans’ old favorites, some recent favorites in new plotlines, and new folks you’ll really want to get to know. It’s like attending your home-town’s small-town festival and running into new friends and people you’ve known for years but haven’t seen in awhile. You’re happy to have a cold one with some of them.
Others, big jerks and troublemakers, not so much.
If this is your first Cork O’Connor novel, reach back a few – at least three or four novels – to get your bearings. If you’re already a fan, get “Spirit Crossing” and put the phone on silent. You won’t answer it anyhow; you’ll be occupied.
