With this eighth installment of his Cork O'Connor series, William Kent Krueger again gives us a mystery that reveals the ties of family, community, tradition and transition in a small northern Minnesota town. "Red Knife" stands on its own, but for those who've followed Krueger's stories about the former sheriff of Tamarack County, this is a welcome visit with an old friend who's grown wiser and more sure of himself over the years.

In a brief prologue, a young Anishinaabeg joins his elders as they rout a group of trespassing Dakota. His mentors have taught him well and, with few qualms, young Blue Jay faces the enemy with confidence.

Two hundred years later, some residents of tiny Aurora fear that the Red Boyz gang on the nearby Ojibwe reservation has perverted that honorable tradition by inviting drug dealers into their midst. Beset by bigotry, poverty and isolation, the town is not the remote idyll it appears to the seasonal tourists. When a white girl dies after taking meth, her roughneck father blames the young Indians. O'Connor, who is part Ojibwe, hopes to defuse the situation by acting as a go-between for Kakaik, leader of the Red Boyz, and the aggrieved father. But the next day Kakaik and his wife are found dead, victims of an execution-style hit, and O'Connor must decide how far to follow his noble intentions.

Krueger keeps readers guessing in this page-turner, and it's a joy to read his easy prose and loving descriptions of northern Minnesota. He uses real events as a springboard for discussing the sometimes desolate land. In one passage, for example, he assails a photograph used in a magazine story to symbolize problems on the reservation: "... to Cork the old gas station was a different kind of symbol. He saw something admirable in it, something that spoke of tenacity, of endurance in the face of neglect and all the other elements that worked to break it down. In a way, it was like the spirit of the Ojibwe."

Another of Krueger's strengths is in creating believable and sympathetic characters caught between love and fear. Spouses and parents weigh whether protecting a loved one will help or hurt. Worldly wise youths look to their elders even as they second-guess them. O'Connor, unlike most fictional private investigators, is a happily married father of three. He wants to believe that all will be well, but when his teenage daughter confides that a sense of foreboding has her "kind of afraid," he admits, "Hell, Annie, I'd be a liar if I said I wasn't scared, too." Through it all, his mentor, the wise Henry Meloux, wrestles with dark visions centered on the site of Blue Jay's early victory.

When some of the leaders from the reservation, somewhat jokingly referring to themselves as the Red Menz, take the Red Boyz under their wing, you want to cheer their attempt to restore order. To Krueger's credit, "Red Knife" does-n't end as neatly as that long-ago battle.

Kathe Connair is a features copy and layout editor.