Review: "Thunder Bay," William Kent Krueger

By Paul Carrier

Henry Meloux, a laconic 90-year-old Ojibwe Indian, serves as a healer -- some might say a medicine man -- for the Indigenous people of Aurora, Minnesota. He is a fascinating but relatively minor character in William Kent Krueger's early Cork O'Connor mysteries, which feature O'Connor as the on-again, off-again sheriff of Tamarack County, Minnesota.

Meloux may well be O'Connor's best friend, and in Thunder Bay, the seventh novel in the series, the never-married Ojibwe finally moves front and center. Meloux is a man with a secret so momentous that it threatens his life, forces him to kill a man in self-defense and sends O’Connor to Ontario, Canada, not once but twice as he tries to fulfill Meloux’s greatest wish.

Meloux claims to have fathered a son some 70 years ago, a son whom he has never met and whose name he does not even know. Identifying the mother as a woman named Maria Lima, Meloux asks— demands, really — that O’Connor not only find his son but bring him to Meloux’s home, so the two can meet at long last.

Thanks to some digging, O’Connor determines that Meloux’s son is Henry Wellington, a retired and notoriously reclusive industrialist living a hermit’s life on an island off Thunder Bay, a city in Ontario, Canada. O’Connor also learns that Lima was the first wife of Leonard Wellington, Henry Wellington’s purported father.

Armed with Meloux’s pocket watch, which contains a photo of Lima, O’Connor heads to Thunder Bay and snags a brief meeting at Henry Wellington's island mansion. To Connor's dismay, the man whom Meloux believes to be his son is a seemingly demented racist and germophobe who refuses to believe that Meloux is his father and angrily orders a servant to evict O”Connor.

The servant, Edward Morrissey, later turns up at Meloux’s cabin in Minnesota, intending to murder the old man. But Meloux guns down his would-be killer, triggering a cross-border investigation as the sheriff’s office in Aurora, Minnesota, tries to figure out why Morrissey targeted Meloux.

Was Morrissey after the elderly man’s gold pocket watch because of its monetary value? Was he under orders from his boss to knock off Meloux and seize Lima’s photo, perhaps to destroy any suggestion that Henry Wellington’s father was, as Wellington put it when he met O’Connor, an “Indian buck”?

Meloux was a thinly sketched fellow in the previous novels. But all that changes this time around as readers learn his origin story, including how he fell in love with Lima some 70 years ago when they found themselves in an Ontario wilderness.

Their love affair, and Krueger’s portrayal of Meloux as a young man, will delight readers who've worked their way through the previous novels in the series. Meloux finally emerges as a fully developed character who is all the more compelling as a result.

The plot takes several shocking turns when Meloux, O’Connor and one of O’Connor’s pals head to Thunder Bay for what they hope will be Meloux’s long-awaited meeting with his son. It proves to be a dangerous mission full of twists that will leave readers racing to discover what the next page will bring.

Krueger tugs at the heartstrings by weaving a very moving subplot into Thunder Bay involving an unrelated family crisis that strikes O’Connor, his wife Jo and their three children. Novels come and go, creating short-lived memories or, sometimes, lasting impressions. Thunder Bay definitely falls into the latter category.