{"id":1433,"date":"2014-08-24T20:09:46","date_gmt":"2014-08-25T02:09:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/?p=1433"},"modified":"2014-08-24T20:09:46","modified_gmt":"2014-08-25T02:09:46","slug":"an-appreciation-of-william-kent-krueger","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/an-appreciation-of-william-kent-krueger\/","title":{"rendered":"An Appreciation of William Kent Krueger"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"William-Kent-Krueger-2014-2\"<\/a>William Kent Krueger visits us this September, appearing, as he has with nearly every one of his now sixteen novels, at Aunt Agatha\u2019s.\u00a0 This lucky association started for us back in 1998 when Kent called and invited himself to the store to sign copies of Iron Lake.<\/i>\u00a0 I was delighted with Kent and his books back in 1998 and I still am today.\u00a0 In between, our tiny staff\u00a0 have all become hard-core Krueger fans and have relentlessly pressed his books on almost every reader we can think of.\u00a0 Every one of them comes back for more.\u00a0 Even my brother, a mystery reader who doesn\u2019t remember authors, asks about that \u201cMinnesota guy.\u201d<\/p>\n

And Kent has only continued to grow and challenge himself as a writer.\u00a0 In a long running series, it\u2019s sometimes difficult to keep things fresh, but Krueger manages to make each of his Cork O\u2019Connor books somehow distinct from one another and enjoyable on their own merits, though I couldn\u2019t recommend more highly reading this series in order and seeing the incredible depth of characterization that Krueger manages to shade into all of his characters as the stories progress.<\/p>\n

His 14th<\/sup> O\u2019Connor book, Windigo Island,\u00a0<\/i> is another wonderful outing.\u00a0 The widowed Cork, now a private consultant, finds himself drawn into the case of a missing young Ojibwe woman, something which leads him into the world of teenage prostitution.\u00a0 Krueger still manages, all these books in, to be fired up about an issue, manages to infuse something new into Cork\u2019s journey, and manages to continue to evoke emotion and tension in equal measure.<\/p>\n

Sometimes there are things in his novels that a lesser writer might not be able to get away with, but Krueger somehow manages it.\u00a0 I always finish one of his books with a box of Kleenex at my side.\u00a0 Long ago when I first read Madeleine L\u2019Engel\u2019s A Wrinkle in Time<\/i> I was captivated by her concept of the \u201ceducated heart.\u201d \u00a0This is a quality Krueger possesses in spades.\u00a0 Nowhere was this quality more evident than in last year\u2019s publication of his Edgar-winning stand-alone novel, Ordinary Grace.<\/i><\/p>\n

It felt like all the things Krueger had been learning as a writer, the things he had been polishing up in his writer\u2019s tool box, were put to use in that incredible novel, a coming of age story set in 1961 Minnesota.\u00a0 And happily, Ordinary Grace <\/i>has been richly and deservedly rewarded by the mystery community with a slew of award nominations and wins.<\/p>\n

And for Jamie and I, who were honored to win a Raven award presented at this year\u2019s Edgar ceremony, it was very satisfactory to see our pal Kent, whom we had known from the start of his career, win Best Novel after a long and steady climb upward.\u00a0 Sometimes bookselling is incredibly rewarding, and that was one of those moments.\u00a0 So please, come meet one of the masters of our genre this September 14 when he will talk about his latest Cork O\u2019Connor novel, along with Denise Swanson and Julia Keller.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

William Kent Krueger visits us this September, appearing, as he has with nearly every one of his now sixteen novels, at Aunt Agatha\u2019s.\u00a0 This lucky association started for us back in 1998 when Kent called and invited himself to the store to sign copies of Iron Lake.\u00a0 I was delighted with Kent and his books … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1433","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-essays"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1433","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1433"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1433\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1435,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1433\/revisions\/1435"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1433"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1433"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1433"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}