Error loading page.
Try refreshing the page. If that doesn't work, there may be a network issue, and you can use our self test page to see what's preventing the page from loading.
Learn more about possible network issues or contact support for more help.

Lightning Strike

ebook
0 of 1 copy available
Wait time: About 6 weeks
0 of 1 copy available
Wait time: About 6 weeks
An instant New York Times bestseller, this prequel to the acclaimed Cork O'Connor series is "a pitch perfect, richly imagined story that is both an edge-of-your-seat thriller and an evocative, emotionally charged coming-of-age tale" (Kristin Hannah, #1 New York Times bestselling author) about fathers and sons, small-town conflicts, and the events that shape our lives forever.
Aurora is a small town nestled in the ancient forest alongside the shores of Minnesota's Iron Lake. In the summer of 1963, it is the whole world to twelve-year-old Cork O'Connor, its rhythms as familiar as his own heartbeat. But when Cork stumbles upon the body of a man he revered hanging from a tree in an abandoned logging camp, it is the first in a series of events that will cause him to question everything he took for granted about his hometown, his family, and himself.

Cork's father, Liam O'Connor, is Aurora's sheriff and it is his job to confirm that the man's death was the result of suicide, as all the evidence suggests. In the shadow of his father's official investigation, Cork begins to look for answers on his own. Together, father and son face the ultimate test of choosing between what their heads tell them is true and what their hearts know is right.

In this "brilliant achievement, and one every crime reader and writer needs to celebrate" (Louise Penny, #1 New York Times bestselling author), beloved novelist William Kent Krueger shows that some mysteries can be solved even as others surpass our understanding.
  • Creators

  • Series

  • Publisher

  • Release date

  • Formats

  • Languages

  • Reviews

    • Library Journal

      March 1, 2021

      In multi-award-winning Andrews's Murder Most Fowl, Meg Langslow's husband is directing a production of Macbeth even as gung-ho reenactors erect an authentic medieval Scottish military camp nearby, which ends in the murder of the unpleasant filmmaker documenting the reenactment (40,000-copy first printing). A BAFTA and multiple mystery award winner, novelist/filmmaker Claudel limns the current refugee crisis, with the inhabitants of backwater Dog Island refusing to disrupt their age-old way of life when three unidentified bodies wash ashore, deciding instead to bury them. In Edgar Award winner Hirahara's 1944-set Clark and Division, 20-year-old Aki, who has moved with her parents to Chicago after their release from the Manzanar concentration camp in California, refuses to believe that her sister Rose's death is a suicide. Lightning Strike, a prequel to Krueger's "Cork O'Connor" series, features Cork's coming-of age in small-town 1963 Minnesota. In Muller's Ice and Stone, durable PI Sharon McCone is enlisted by the organization Crimes Against Indigenous Sisters when two more Indigenous women are brutally dispatched in what the police refuse to regard as a pattern (25,000-copy first printing). The Madness of Crowds, the next in Penny's sensational "Chief Inspector Gamache" series, sends the chief inspector home to Three Pines, Canada, after a sojourn in Paris. Following Trinchieri's well-received debut, Murder in Chianti, The Bitter Taste of Murder finds former NYPD Nico Doyle comfortably settled in his late wife's Tuscan hometown--until the ruthless wine critic who's just arrived is murdered.

      Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

    • Publisher's Weekly

      June 14, 2021
      At the start of bestseller Krueger’s suspenseful 18th mystery, a prequel, featuring former sheriff turned PI Cork O’Connor (after 2018’s Desolation Mountain), 12-year-old Cork, who’s one-quarter Ojibwe, makes a horrifying discovery while hiking one day in 1963 in Minnesota’s Superior National Forest—the hanged corpse of Big John Manydeeds, the uncle of a friend of Cork’s from the Iron Lake Reservation. With no signs of foul play, the death is quickly ruled a suicide, especially after evidence is found that Big John, a recovering alcoholic, had fallen off the wagon. Cork’s father, the Tamarack County sheriff, adopts that conclusion, but Cork isn’t so sure, especially after seeing an apparition he believes might be the dead man’s troubled spirit at the place where Big John died. He investigates, ultimately convincing his father that the case may be a homicide and that it’s reasonable to look into those with a possible murder motive. Krueger makes the youthful version of his lead plausible, as well as his detective abilities. Longtime fans will relish Cork’s rich backstory. Agent: Danielle Egan-Miller, Brown & Miller Literary Assoc.

    • Library Journal

      Starred review from July 1, 2021

      This prequel to Krueger's "Cork O'Connor" series begins in January 1989. Cork, the newly elected sheriff of Tamarack County, MN, reflects on the case that changed his relationship with his father in the summer of 1963, when Cork was 12. In '63, his father Liam is the sheriff; when Cork finds the hanging body of Big John Manydeeds, Liam investigates. Liam is pulled between Tamarack County's white residents, who think Manydeeds was drunk and killed himself, and the county's Ojibwe residents, who don't believe that Manydeeds, who was Ojibwe, died by suicide. Liam searches for logical answers, while Cork grapples with questions about death and witnesses a shadow that haunts the Lightning Strike site where Manydeeds was found. Cork, who is one-quarter Ojibwe, finds spiritual answers and provides clues to his white father, who will always be an outsider in the county. Anger is the only response for a 12-year-old when his father's decisions seem to put community before family. VERDICT This sensitive, moving prequel introduces and draws readers into the series. Krueger (Ordinary Grace; This Tender Land) has written another perceptive coming-of-age novel, the poignant story of a father and son trying to understand each other. It provides Cork O'Connor's backstory for those who haven't read the series.--Lesa Holstine, Evansville Vanderburgh P.L., IN

      Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Formats

  • Kindle Book
  • OverDrive Read
  • EPUB ebook

Languages

  • English

Loading