The iron ranges around Lake Superior did not figure prominently in William Kent Krueger's earliest Cork O'Connor crime novels, which feature a protagonist who is a county sheriff turned private investigator in rural Aurora, Minnesota. But an inactive iron mine is front and center in Vermilion Drift, the 10th novel in the lengthy O'Connor series.
It's 2010 or thereabouts. Wealthy mine owner Max Cavanaugh hires O’Connor to track down his beautiful, intelligent and narcissistic sister, Lauren, who runs a local retreat for artists but has recently disappeared. O’Connor’s tasks multiply when Cavanaugh, a mining company official named Lou Haddad, and consultant Eugenia Kufus all receive anonymous written threats.
The notes seem designed to torpedo a tentative government plan to bury nuclear waste in the abandoned mine. It’s that plan that Kufus is researching, as she tries to determine whether the mine is stable enough to handle the waste.
All three identical notes contain a single curt message: We die. U die. Later, Haddad finds the same warning painted on a wall in the mine. Haddad insists, persuasively, that the message could not have been painted by anyone who was authorized to be in the mine, which supposedly has only one way in and out.
That claim — that there is a carefully controlled single access point to the mine — proves to be incorrect. Someone found a secret entryway, and used it to create a sealed chamber of horrors in a tunnel.
Removing that subterranean room’s wall to gain access, O’Connor finds six human bodies, five of which are nothing more than skeletal remains. The sixth body has not been there long enough to become skeletal, although decomposition is well underway.
All of the bodies are female, and four of them turn out to be Indigenous. That suggests a connection to the unexplained disappearances of several Ojibwe women and girls back in the mid 1960s, a mystery that came to be known in Aurora as The Vanishings.
The other two murder victims are Cavanaugh’s mother and sister. Both were shot with the same revolver, a gun that O’Connor inherited from his father, who died when O'Connor was still a boy. He has not had the weapon for years, having given it to Henry Meloux, an aged Indigenous man, for safekeeping. The revolver has disappeared from Meloux’s hiding place, however, and its whereabouts are unknown as the police investigation of the murders continues.
It testifies to Krueger’s skill as a writer that O’Connor, whose heritage is a mix of Irish and Ojibwe (aka, Chippewa) is such a well-rounded character. A widower whose three children are out of town for the time being, he is trying to come to terms with his altered lifestyle while helping local and state officials with the murder cases.
Sifting through his deceased mother's journals, O'Connor finds vague clues that may link his father, Liam, to The Vanishings in some unexplained way. Liam was the county sheriff when The Vanishings occurred. Lonely and troubled, O’Connor is dogged by persistent nightmares in which he pushes his father to his death. (In fact, the senior O’Connor was gunned down during a crime spree, while trying to protect an elderly woman who had stumbled into the line of fire.)
Krueger is not a writer of cozy mysteries, and the crimes that preceded most of the six mine murders are particularly gruesome. But Krueger describes them obliquely, making the disclosures a bit more bearable for the reader than they would be if the author had played them up for shock value.
There are so many twists in Vermilion Drift that answers to some of the most important secrets remain elusive until the final chapters. As with every puzzle in this dark and cleverly plotted novel, the late revelations are well worth the wait.
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