"In southeast Minnesota, down on the Mississippi, a school board meeting is coming to a close. The board chairman announces that the rest of the meeting will be closed, due to personnel issues. "Issues" is correct. The proposal up for a vote before them is whether a local reporter should die. And the vote is four to one in favor. Meanwhile, not far away, Virgil Flowers is doing a favor for a friend by looking into a dognapping, which seems to be turning...

Looking back at a tragic event that occurred during his thirteenth year, Frank Drum explores how a complicated web of secrets, adultery, and betrayal shattered his Methodist family and their small 1961 Minnesota community.

The first of Sinclair Lewis’s great successes, Main Street shattered the sentimental American myth of happy small-town life with its satire of narrow-minded provincialism. Reflecting his own unhappy childhood in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, Lewis’s sixth novel attacked the conformity and dullness he saw in midwestern village life. Young college graduate Carol Milford moves from the city to tiny Gopher Prairie after marrying the local...

When protests about a superstore chain's plans to build a location in a Minnesota river town escalate into bombing attacks at the construction site and the company's headquarters, Virgil Flowers races against time to find and stop the bomber.

When a murder suspect commits suicide after his arrest for killing a soybean farmer, Virgil Flowers uncovers a multi-generation, multi-family conspiracy involving a series of monstrous crimes.

Laura and her family move to Minnesota where they live in a dugout until a new house is built and face misfortunes caused by flood, blizzard, and grasshoppers.

"A small independent bookstore in Minneapolis is haunted from November 2019 to November 2020 by the store's most annoying customer. Flora dies on All Souls' Day, but she simply won't leave the store. Tookie, who has landed a job selling books after years of incarceration that she survived by reading 'with murderous attention,' must solve the mystery of this haunting while at the same time trying to understand all that occurs in Minneapolis during...

The 200 acres of great white pines, sacred to the Anishinaabe tribe and known to them as Minishoomisag (the native word for Our Grandfathers), lie just a stone's throw from the lumber mill of Karl Lindstrom, a wealthy industrialist hardly known for his environmental sensitivity. So, when an explosion at Lindstrom's mill results in the death of one of his night watchmen, it's little wonder that suspicion falls on the tribesmen. And for Cork O'Connor,...

Cork O'Connor has lost both his wife and his job as sheriff and falls into a profound emotional isolation. As a wild blizzard buries his lakeside town, a despised though influential resident is found dead, and a young Ojibwe Indian boy seems to have left home in a hurry. Cork has never taken Indian legends to heart, but when an old sage warns him that a cruel spirit with a heart of ice is near, all that changes.

In William Kent Krueger's "finest work" (Michael Connelly), detective Cork O'Connor unravels a mystery for his old friend Henry Meloux, only to get caught in the blistering crossfire of jealousy and revenge.
The promise, as I remember it, happened this way.

Happy and content in his hometown of Aurora, Minnesota, Cork O'Connor has left his badge behind and is ready for a life of relative peace, setting up shop as...