Vermilion Drift
Written by William Kent Krueger
Narrated by David Chandler
4/5
()
About this audiobook
William Kent Krueger
William Kent Krueger is the New York Times bestselling author of The River We Remember, This Tender Land, Ordinary Grace (winner of the Edgar Award for best novel), and the original audio novella The Levee, as well as nineteen acclaimed books in the Cork O’Connor mystery series, including Lightning Strike and Fox Creek. He lives in the Twin Cities with his family. Learn more at WilliamKentKrueger.com.
More audiobooks from William Kent Krueger
The River We Remember: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Ordinary Grace Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Levee Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Devil's Bed Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Related to Vermilion Drift
Titles in the series (19)
Boundary Waters Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Iron Lake (20th Anniversary Edition) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Purgatory Ridge Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Copper River Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Thunder Bay Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Mercy Falls Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Blood Hollow Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Windigo Island Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Red Knife Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Vermilion Drift Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Heaven's Keep Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Tamarack County Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Trickster's Point Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Northwest Angle Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Desolation Mountain Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Manitou Canyon Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Lightning Strike Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Sulfur Springs Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Fox Creek Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Related audiobooks
Mercy Falls Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Fox Creek Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Heaven's Keep Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Northwest Angle Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Windigo Island Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Red Knife Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Thunder Bay Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Manitou Canyon Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Sulfur Springs Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Desolation Mountain Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Trickster's Point Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Copper River Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Tamarack County Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Blood Hollow Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Purgatory Ridge Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Boundary Waters Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Lightning Strike Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Iron Lake (20th Anniversary Edition) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Cold Day in Paradise Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Endangered: A Sam Westin Mystery: Book 1 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Ice Run Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Figure Eight: A Northern Lakes Mystery Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Blood Is the Sky Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Nothing Short of Dying: A Clyde Barr Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Patrick Flint Series: Books 1-3: Switchback, Snake Oil, and Sawbones Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Judas Judge Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Sitting Duck: A Patrick Flint Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Long Ago Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Slow Kill Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Cold Snap Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
Mystery For You
Listen for the Lie: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5None of This is True: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Complete Sherlock Holmes Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Did I Kill You?: A Thriller Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Silence of the Lambs: 25th Anniversary Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Murder Your Employer: The McMasters Guide to Homicide Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Mother-Daughter Murder Night: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5And Then There Were None Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5When No One Is Watching: A Thriller Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Perfume: The Story of a Murderer Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5What Lies in the Woods: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Unexpected Guest Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Hit and Run Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Strange Case of the Alchemist's Daughter Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Woman in the Library, The Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Death on the Nile: A Hercule Poirot Mystery: The Official Authorized Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Heaven’s Crooked Finger Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Murder on the Orient Express: A Hercule Poirot Mystery: The Official Authorized Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The 7 ½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Crooked House Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5One for the Money: A Stephanie Plum Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Still Life: A Chief Inspector Gamache Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Tell No One Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Complete Sookie Stackhouse Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This Tender Land Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Word is Murder: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Hallowe'en Party: A Hercule Poirot Mystery: The Official Authorized Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Murder of Roger Ackroyd: A Hercule Poirot Mystery: The Official Authorized Edition Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Book of Extraordinary Impossible Crimes and Puzzling Deaths: The Best New Original Stories of the Genre Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Crossroad Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for Vermilion Drift
233 ratings20 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Gripping story, interesting new characters, lots of background on major players we’ve come to know and love. One of the best in the series thus far.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This is a great series, and this particular book was especially good. I enjoyed finding out more about Cork's early life and his relationship with his father. Moving on to #11! :-)
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5It was my favorite so far. I am trying to read them in order, but I accidentally jumped to this one. I don’t think anything was spoiled by my actions.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The writing and the story line, they just grab you and unfortunately I didn’t finish all the chores I wanted to do.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Cork finds himself investigating a decades old cold case as he tries to solve a current murder. Mining interests and the local residents clash over the possibility of storing nuclear waste in old mine shafts.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A murder mystery set in Aurora and related to an old Iron Mine and one of its passages: the vermilion drift. Initially he is hired to look for the missing sister of the mine’s owner. He is also working for the mine trying to see who. Is behind some threatening graffiti related to a plan to store nuclear waste in the mine. Cork discovers two things as he begins his investigation: 1) there is a secret entrance to the mine coming from an abandoned shaft, and that shaft contains several bodies. Most are decades old but one is the woman who he had been hired to find. Working as a consultant to the sherif Cork finds himself drawn into the hunt for the killers and uncertainty about what role his father may have played in the cold case murders. Through hard work, knowledge of his community, intuition and finally the aid of his Mento, Henry, the shaman, he comes to understand both the contemporary murder and the much older murders.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Think that might have been one of his best Cork stories to date!!!
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5very good novel, and interesting mystery. I will look forward to more from this author.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/510 books into this series and I'm still loving every entry. A lot happened in the last book that made we question where the series was going to go from there, but this was one was just as good at the others before it. You have got to read this series in order though if you have any hope of appreciating the characters.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5In Vermillion Drift, the 10th installment of the Cork O’Conner series, Cork investigates threats to mine officials who want to use the mine as a storage for nuclear waste. (A drift is a horizontal tunnel off of a vertical shaft). Cork is also asked to investigate the disappearance of the mine owner’s sister. The plot takes a turn when the bodies of five women are found in the mine. Four are from long ago, but one is recent. The investigation forces Cork to confront long suppressed memories involving his father.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5*** WARNING -- SOME SPOILERS FOR PREVIOUS BOOKS IN THIS SERIES ***
Another great entry in the series. This one covers a serial killer who was active over 40 years ago when Cork was a teenager. The disappearances of his victims were known as "The Vanishings". Now Cork has discovered where the bodies are, and there is a new victim.
This book was really different in that Cork was living alone, which hasn't been the case since 'Iron Mountain', the first book in the series. I liked the fact that he was reevaluating his life and his purpose without having his family around. As usual Cork becomes deeply involved in the investigation and the outcome was carefully plotted, if not entirely surprising. Another great book in a consistently fine series. - Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5I did not enjoy this book as I have with the previous books in this series. I found myself skipping pages. The Native lore is interesting but for me, that's about it for this book.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5William Kent Krueger's fictional world of Aurora continues to provide a rich and plot-full background for this excellent series. Never a simple county cop, Cork O'Connor continues to fight personal demons and cultural biases to solve a complex series of crimes that originated during his father's tenure as a county policeman. He tells a good story enriched by solid sustaining characters leavened by intriguing newcomers. May, Henry Meloux live to be a hundred.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5William Kent Kreuger's mystery series featuring Cork O'Connor seemed, in my mind, to start out relatively slowly. I felt that it wasn't until his fourth or fifth book that he really hit his stride. I'm very thankful that I had bought up his complete series before beginning to read them (based on an enthusiastic review I read of a later book).. otherwise I might have given up on the series early on and missed some really great stories. And in hindsight even the early books have a great deal to offer. The novels are set in rural, northern Minnesota for the most part with the action shifting to The U.P. of Michigan in one story and to Wyoming in another. Mr. Kreuger gives Cork O'Connor a family life that is anything but 'storybook'. From one end to the other this is a loving, but modern family, with real life modern problems that they do manage to get resolved. Fairly early in the series, the stories begin increasingly encompassing Cork's and his family's Native American connection to good advantage!This is a very good and satisfying series which I gobbled up faster and faster towards the end. Now I have to sit and eagerly await the next Cork O'Connor adventure. This is a series where the books could be read as stand alones, but for maximum enjoyment I would strongly recommend reading them in the order that they were written.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Vermilion Drift is another excellent mystery by William Kent Kruegar. Cork O'Conner becomes involved in the mystery of finding a missing woman which leads to finding bodies of individuals who were missing years ago. The details of iron ore mining could be boring, but the author did a great job of keeping the reader interested in the details of mining. The twist and turns and the Ojibwe Indian lore and legend are just fascinating. What a great story!!
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5VERMILION DRIFT by William Kent Krueger is not a formulaic thriller. But it sure is a mystery/thriller.In this book, Cork O’Connor is a private investigator hired to find the person leaving threatening messages for various people involved in the use of a former mine for the storage of nuclear waste. One of those men also hires Cork to find his sister. So Cork is doing both jobs at once. But this doesn’t last long. She is found, along with the skeletal remains of five other people, in a hidden area of the mine, the Vermilion Drift.Now it is Cork’s job not only to learn who is leaving the messages but, also, to help find the person or people who murdered five people 40 years ago (as determined by a forensic anthropologist) and one person a week ago. At first, some mysteries, like whose bones have been there for 40 years, unravel quickly. But did the same person or people kill all six people, the five in 1964 and the one more recently? Do the protest and the protesters outside the mine have anything to do with the recent murder? How are the older murders and the recent murder connected? Why do four of the skeletal remains belong to Indians while one belongs to a white woman who was the mother of the sixth murder victim? Could Cork’s own gun, the gun that was his father’s when he was county sheriff 40 years ago, have been the murder weapon? Why are certain pages cut from Cork’s mother’s 40-year-old journal? These are some of the mysteries Cork must solve. This is one book in a series about Cork O’Connor, but it doesn’t seem necessary to read the series in order. Krueger explains that Cork’s wife was murdered a year ago; his children are adults now, scattered to various parts of the country; he is part Indian, and his past and present jobs have been and are involved with Indians and the local Indian reservation (the “rez”); and, like his father, he used to be county sheriff. That’s explanation enough.VERMILION DRIFT is a thriller, with stories within stories within stories and with the answer to one question leading to more questions. It’s better than most bestselling thrillers because it’s not formulaic as so many thrillers are. It is character-driven.Only one criticism: the old Indian Henry. He knows so much yet will speak only in riddles throughout the book. And Cork reveres him. He just goes along with Henry’s evasiveness and his sometimes corny Indian traditions and rituals that act like pauses in elements of the story that might have been more thrilling. Even so, readers will enjoy and appreciate this nonformulaic thriller. My criticism is debatable.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Former sheriff, Cork O'Connor is hired to find Lauren Cavanaugh by her brother, Max. Max is the owner of the Great North Mining Co. and Vermillion One is one of their deepest mines. It is being considered for a dumping site for nuclear waste. This is causing heated protests from the locals.After meeting with Max, Cork is asked to look at something spray painted on the inside wall of the mine, "We die, you die." Since no one saw the person who did the spray-painting, Cork knew that there must be another enterance to the mine.When he looks for this other enterance, he finds a secret room with six dead bodies. Five of them have been there for years but one has recently been placed there. This reminds Cork of The Vanishings.In 1964, two teenage Indian American women disappeared, then a rich white woman disappeared also. This white woman was Monique Cavanaugh, Lauren's mother.In a story deep with Indian folk lore, Cork speaks to his ancient friend, Henry Meloux. Despite advancing age, Henry can sense things. He tells Cork that there is unrest in the reservation and tells Cork who to speak to in order to identify the other two bodies found in the mind.It is interesting that Cork's father was the sheriff when The Vanishings took place. It creates a moral dilemma for Cork to consider if his father was involved with the missing women. Then, Cork makes another discovery that brings the case even closer to him.As always with William Kent Krueger, there are details about the Ojibwe Indian culture and beliefs. Cork is realistically described and the story is told as if the pieces were put together like parts of a menu that is eventually laid out for the reader to learn and be entertained by its rich detail.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This is the tenth in a series about P.I. "Cork" O'Connor. I'm surprised I haven't cone across any of the previous 9, since I like mysteries. I especially enjoyed this book because of the info on iron-ore mining in Minnesota. My grandfather worked on the Mahoning Mine on the Mesabi Range near Hibbing, Minnesota back in the day. I visited that mine and heard stories about the mining operation when I was growing up. I know all about the large number of immigrants there....mostly Scandanavian and Irish (as am I), but heard almost nothing of the Native Americans in the area. Not surprising, I suppose, for that time. It was a good story, although I figured out the killer fairly early on. I do think that the revelations at the end would have been discovered much, much earlier in Cork's life. Some disconnects for me, but overall a good story.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This is the tenth book in a series involving detective Corcoran “Cork” O’Connor of Tamarack County, Minnesota, but I have never read any of his books prior to this one. It turned out not to matter at all; this book stands alone with no problem. You learn quite a bit about iron mining in this suspense/mystery, as well as about the local Ojibwe concerns and customs, and I really liked that. I feel “guilty” enough as it is just reading a murder mystery, but when I can learn something from it, I feel better.The [fictional] Vermilion One Iron Mine near where O’Connor lives is being investigated as a potential site for nuclear waste disposal. [Indian Country has often been considered for hazardous waste sites. The poverty and political disenfranchisement of Native Americans make them more tempting targets than more politically astute and well-funded constituencies.] Protestors at the mine site seem dangerous. Several mining officials have received threatening notes. And now Lauren Cavanaugh, sister of Max, who runs the mine, is missing. Max contacts Cork, an old friend, to ask him to help find her. It turns out he does, along with five other bodies.Cork is a retired county sheriff and is now a private investigator. He’s a widower with three grown children, and is alone except for the family dog. He is also part Ojibwe. The current sheriff, Marsha Dross, asks him to work for her to help solve the murders; his contacts among the Ojibwe will help greatly. Eventually Cork is able to solve both mysteries: not only the recent murder of Lauren but the older killings as well. In the course of doing so, however, he requires help from an Ojibwe Medicine Man named Henry Meloux, who, well past ninety years old, has helped out Cork all his life.Evaluation: The suspense level isn’t particularly high in this book, but I enjoyed it for all of its other positive attributes. I liked the way Krueger was able to portray the emotional state of a man suddenly adrift in life with his wife and children gone. I found the Ojibwe customs interesting, and I really liked learning about mining in a very non-technical way as well.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Vermilion Drift is the 10th book in Wm. Kent Krueger's Cork O'Connor series and the first I've read; I enjoyed it thoroughly and I highly recommend it. Here's a few reasons why - A very interesting plot, having to do with a five unsolved murders 40 years ago and a current murder, with a number of links between them. I like Cork - he is one of the few flawed, non-alcoholic investigators I've encountered in crime fiction. The setting is very interesting, the iron mining region of northern Minnesota, and there are great descriptions of mine drifts far below ground, as well as scenes in the deep and sometimes ominous forest; I felt I learned a lot about both without being preached to. There are great descriptions of place throughout the book, whether it's a neighbor's cluttered lawn or an arts center wreaking of "bad medicine". The pace of the story is quick; I was constantly changing viewpoint on the identity of the perpetrator(s). There is good description of the ethnic mix of the region, encompassing the Ojibwe and numerous European immigrant communities, and candor regarding where whites and Indians trust and respect each other today, and where they don't. The only problem I had with the book was with one of the most likeable characters, Henry, an Indian elder - but he's the all-knowing, mystical guru who can even erase memory. A bit too much for me, but I am a bit of a cynic. I've read other western crime fiction, including Hillerman, Johnson, Box, Pearson, and I prefer Krueger's book to them all.