Leaving behind a stressful law enforcement career to become a private investigator in his small Minnesota hometown, Cork O'Connor is asked by an Ojibwe healer to help him find the son the man fathered years earlier, a case that culminates in an attempt on the Ojibwe's life.

Corcoran O'Connor is caught in the middle of a gang dispute between the Aurora Anglos and the Ojibwe Reservation Red Boyz, a situation that turns deadly when the Red Boyz leader and his wife are found murdered.

"Months after the tragedy, two women show up on Cork's doorstep with evidence that the pilot of Jo's plane was not the man he claimed to be. It may not be definitive proof, but it's a ray of light in the darkness. Agreeing to investigate, Cork travels to Wyoming, where he battles the interferences of local law enforcement who may be on the take, the open hostility of the Northern Arapaho, who have much to lose if the truth is known, and the continuing...

Cork O'Connor is called in to investigate when a deadly explosion rocks the lumber mill of Karl Lindstrom, a wealthy, anti-environmentalist industrialist, whose mill is near an ancient tract of pine forest sacred to the Anishinaabe tribe.

Cork O'Connor has always considered November to be the cruelest of months, yet his daughter has chosen this dismal time of year in which to marry. When a man camping in Minnesota's Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness goes missing, Cork is asked by the man's family to stay on the case. The wedding is fast approaching, the weather looks threatening, but Cork doesn't return from the search. Locating Cork's campsite, they find blood-- a lot of it.

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,...