Review: "Heaven's Keep," William Kent Krueger

By Paul Carrier

The early novels in William Kent Krueger’s crime series repeatedly remind readers that county sheriff turned private investigator Cork O’Connor, the protagonist, is a lucky man blessed with a loving family.

In addition to two daughters and a son, the lineup includes his devoted but independent-minded wife Jo, a lawyer who often represents Indigenous Ojibwe (aka, Chippewa) people in fictional Aurora, Minnesota, where the O’Connor clan lives.

But in Heaven’s Keep, the ninth novel in the series, the family suffers a devastating shock when a plane carrying Jo on a business trip to Seattle disappears while flying over mountainous terrain in Wyoming.

An intensive search does not turn up any trace of the charter flight, leading Cork and his children to assume, to their horror, that Jo and the other passengers on board died in a crash during a heavy snow storm.

Months pass as Cork and his children try to come to terms, as best they can, with the loss of a wife and mother. But Jo’s disappearance takes on a new aspect when two women show up in Aurora claiming that the pilot of the missing plan was not who he claimed to be.

Becca Bodine, whose husband was originally thought to have been flying the plane, says the man at the controls during that flight was not Clinton Bodine, who has disappeared. Also missing: a private investigator whom Becca hired to figure out what happened on that flight.

At the request of the missing pilot’s wife and her lawyer, Cork agrees to conduct an investigation of his own. Questions abound. Why did an imposter take to the skies with Jo and other passengers on board, and who was he? What, if anything, will that mysterious turn of events reveal about Jo’s fate? And what became of Clinton Bodine, the scheduled pilot, and Steve Stilwell, the private investigator who had been on the case until he too went missing?

Heaven’s Keep is by far the most harrowing of the first nine novels in Krueger’s long-running series (22 books so far), both because of Jo’s presumed death and the startling developments that follow the plane’s disappearance.

The novel tells a dark, nail-biting tale, and the final chapters carry the reader along at an almost cinematic pace. The contrast between good and evil is stark, but not always immediately clear, building suspense as the story unfolds.

Despite his initial belief that Jo and the other passengers died when their plane went down, subsequent events lead Cork to hope, however tentatively, that his wife may be alive. Is that even a remote possibility under the circumstances, or merely the wishful thinking of a distraught husband?

As with the previous novels in this series, Heaven’s Keep features strong Indigenous elements. Cork is of mixed Irish and Ojibwe descent. The Ojibwe of Minnesota and the Arapaho of Wyoming figure prominently in the novel.

Full-blooded and mixed race characters, including Cork’s 13-year-old son Stephen, have visions that may be central to the plot. In fact, after Stephen has a vision that he believes provides a clue to his mother's whereabouts, the boy goes on a solitary woodland vision quest, or rite of passage, under the tutelage of Henry Meloux, an elderly Ojibwe healer who is Cork’s best friend and a recurring character in the series.