When I received the book, Heaven's Keep, by award-winning Minnesota author William Kent Krueger, I wondered if I was the right person to be reviewing it.  My impression of Krueger is that he might be a bit of a cowboy.  I'm not disparaging cowboys.  The cowboyier a man is, the better.  What I wondered was, could he write a book that I would care to read?

Turns out he could, and he did.

Any reservations I may have had about getting through the book disappeared with the first sentence of Chapter Two.  "Cy Borkman's enormous butt ate the stool he sat on."  Now that's a sentence I can sink my teeth into.  I was committed to finding other gems in the following chapters.

It took almost no time for me to be hooked by the storyline.  The novel's main character, Cork O'Connor, a bit of a cowboy in his own right, receives news that his wife's plane has disappeared in a blizzard in the rugged landscape of Wyoming.  Several states away, in northeastern Minnesota, the O'Connor family gathers together to wait for news of her fate, letting them know one way or the other.

Is she alive, or isn't she?

Krueger isn't shy about mixing faith in a higher power with the wisdom of Native American elders - those who have visions, and those who interpret them.  There is beauty in O'Connor leaving his youngest son in the care of an elder, to seek his own vision, while O'Connor travels to Wyoming to find his wife.

It was especially satisfying for me to read the names of communities, like Duluth, that I have visited and blogged about.  Each night, I looked forward to crawling into bed with Krueger's novel and getting to the bottom of the mystery.  Was the plane's disappearance an accident, or something more diabolical?  (My dark side was hoping for a conspiracy) Would he find his wife, Jo?  Would she be alive?

I can't tell you.  But I can tell you this.  The ending surprised me.  Krueger is a truly gifted story teller, and I believe I would recognize his characters on the street if I ran into one.  I enjoyed Heaven's Keep, a novel outside of my typical genre. 

Now I understand why my folk-blogging friend, Audrey Kletscher Helbling, over at Minnesota Prairie Roots, was so excited about the Cork O'Connor series.  She knows what she's talking about.