WILLIAM KENT KRUEGER – Vermilion Drift. Atria Books, hardcover, September 2010; trade paperback, June 2011.

   A year after the death of his wife, Cork O’Connor has started a “confidential investigation and security consulting business.” He is hired by Max Cavanaugh, the owner of the Great North Mining Company, to investigate the disappearance of his sister Lauren.

   At the same time he is looking into who is sending threatening letters to those involved in a government investigation of the company’s shuttered Vermilion One iron mine as a possible place for long term storage of radioactive waste, which many locals violently oppose.

   When Cork is called upon to enter the mine to look at graffiti deep inside with the same threatening message, he figures there must be another entrance to the mine. While exploring a walled out passage that is marked on maps as a collapse, he discovers that it is still a viable passage, and exploring down the passage he stumbles on a side cavern that contains the remains of six victims — one recent and five older.

   The recent victim turns out to be the missing sister, but the others are half a century old, and may be the remains of “the Vanishings” — three Indian girls who disappeared in the summer of 1964, when Cork’s father was sheriff. Further investigation reveals that one of the Indian woman victims has a bullet lodged in her spine, and that the same gun used in that fifty year old killing was used to kill Lauren.

   And what may that have to do with the reoccurring nightmares Cook is having about being responsible for his father’s death? This reminds me a lot of the style of a Ross MacDonald novel — where past violence has led to tragedy in the present. The novel starts rather slowly, but about 100 pages in it turns into a compulsive page turner. Not as good as Heaven’s Keep, the previous novel in the series — this is number ten — but still a satisfying read.

Rating: B.