Apostle's Cove

The twenty-first installment in the Cork O'Connor mystery series opens on a quiet autumn night in Aurora, Minnesota. Cork O'Connor, the aging owner of a burger joint called Sam's Place and an occasional private investigator, sits alone tallying receipts when his son Stephen calls. Stephen, a second-year law student interning with the Great North Innocence Project, an organization that reviews cases for wrongful convictions, delivers a devastating claim: He believes Cork sent an innocent man to prison.

The novel shifts twenty-five years into the past. Cork has just been sworn in as sheriff of Tamarack County, working beneath a courthouse clock frozen since the shooting death of his father, Liam O'Connor. A frantic 911 call reports a stabbing at the Timber Lodge and Resort's caretaker cabin. Cork races to the scene and finds Chastity Boshey, a young wife and mother, dead from multiple stab wounds. Beside the body sits Aphrodite McGill, Chastity's mother, holding a butcher knife and soaked in her daughter's blood. Aphrodite accuses her son-in-law, Axel Boshey, a member of the local Iron Lake Ojibwe community, of the murder. The toddler Moonbeam, Chastity and Axel's daughter, is unharmed in her crib.

Captain Ed Larson, Cork's lead investigator, determines that the actual murder weapon was the fireplace poker, not the butcher knife. The coroner reveals Chastity sustained a blow to the head before being stabbed seven times and was pregnant. Investigators find bloody clothing matching Axel's sizes hidden in the woodshed, and all prints on the poker and doorknob have been wiped clean.

Cork drives to the Iron Lake Ojibwe Reservation to search for Axel, enlisting Sam Winter Moon, an Ojibwe elder and Cork's surrogate father figure, to navigate the community's distrust of law enforcement. Axel's mother, Patsy Boshey, confirms her son dropped off his stepson Sundown after a fight with Chastity but does not know where Axel went. At the North Star bar, Celine Fineday, the bar owner's wife, reveals that Axel drank there, called a woman from the pay phone, said he wished Chastity was dead, and left just before midnight.

When Axel arrives at his mother's house, he bolts and fights before Sam calms the situation. Asked if he killed Chastity, Axel replies that he does not know. Under interrogation, he claims he has blackouts from heavy drinking and cannot remember what happened after leaving the bar. Cork's wife, Jo O'Connor, an attorney called by Sam, arrives to represent Axel. Phone records reveal Axel called Bernadette Polaski, the town librarian, the night of the murder. Bernadette admits she and Axel have been in a romantic relationship and that he came to her apartment after one a.m. and stayed all night.

The investigation branches in several directions. Deputy Rocky Martinelli, the son-in-law of former sheriff Wild Bill Gunderson, attacks Axel in his jail cell with racial slurs, and Cork suspends him. Cork visits Aphrodite at Shangri-La, her eccentric estate, and finds Wild Bill there in a relationship with her. A deputy spotted Aphrodite's distinctive pink Volkswagen on the road the night of the murder, but she offers only a vague explanation.

After praying with Father Jude Monroe, the young parish priest, Axel announces he is ready to confess. His account is fragmented and vague, and Cork suspects Axel may be covering for someone. Bernadette insists Axel is innocent and urges Cork to look at Aphrodite, revealing that Chastity blamed her mother for a lifetime of neglect and abuse. Bernadette then vanishes from Aurora. Jo convinces Axel to enter a Norgaard plea, a legal option in which a defendant acknowledges the prosecution's evidence while maintaining no clear memory of committing the crime. Axel reveals that Chastity caught Aphrodite behaving inappropriately with young Sundown and had threatened to report her, providing another possible motive. Even so, Axel insists he alone killed Chastity. On Halloween, a judge sentences him to life in prison without parole.

The novel shifts to the present. Stephen invites Cork and his second wife, Rainy, to Saint Paul, where Cork meets Sundown Boshey, now a university professor who goes by Sunny, and Marianne Polaski, the daughter Bernadette was carrying when she fled Aurora. DNA testing confirms Axel fathered both Sunny and Marianne, but Moonbeam's DNA does not match Axel's, meaning someone else is her biological father. Sunny asks Cork to reinvestigate.

At Stillwater prison, Axel is transformed: calm and purposeful as a leader of the White Bison Wellbriety program for inmates recovering from addiction. He explains that he confessed because he believed Bernadette killed Chastity and wanted to protect her and their unborn child. He agrees to let Cork investigate on one condition: that Cork share any truth with him first.

Cork's eldest daughter, Jenny, now a novelist, joins the reinvestigation. Sheriff Marsha Dross, Cork's former deputy, sends a DNA sample from Chastity's autopsy to the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA), Minnesota's state crime lab. The result confirms that whoever Chastity had sex with the night she died was also Moonbeam's biological father and was not of Native blood. Cork and Jenny visit Shangri-La, where Aphrodite refuses to cooperate. Cork is later ambushed outside Sam's Place by an assailant who warns him to stay away from her. Jenny tracks down Father Jude Monroe, who left the priesthood and now runs a homeless shelter in Duluth. He reveals Chastity's troubles originated at Shangri-La but cannot reveal what Chastity told him in confession. At the shelter, Cork notices Maggie, a long-term resident who helps in the kitchen, and finds her oddly familiar though he cannot place why.

On Halloween, Cork and Jenny infiltrate Aphrodite's annual costume party. Screaming erupts from the terrace: Moonbeam stands over Aphrodite's body, a knife in her hand, saying she pulled it from her grandmother's heart. Moonbeam tells investigators that an older woman in a red wig whispered something to Aphrodite, who followed the woman outside. A couple from the Duluth shelter reports their car stolen by a resident named Maggie. Cork connects the pieces: Maggie is Lucy Martinelli, Wild Bill's daughter and Rocky Martinelli's former wife, who was presumed dead in a sanitarium fire twenty-five years earlier. During the original investigation, Deputy Dross learned that Lucy claimed an angel had renamed her Magdalene, and "Maggie" is a shortened form of that name.

At Wild Bill's lakeside cabin, Lucy holds her father and Martinelli at gunpoint. She explains she went to Shangri-La to apologize to Aphrodite for killing Chastity, because Wild Bill had convinced her during her years in a sanitarium that she committed the murder. When Lucy confessed this to Aphrodite, Aphrodite attacked her with a knife, and Lucy killed her in the struggle. Under threat of the shotgun, Wild Bill admits he drowned Lucy's mother, sexually abused Lucy throughout her childhood, and told Lucy she killed Chastity to keep her silent.

Martinelli, terrified, blurts out the full truth: Lucy did not kill Chastity. Aphrodite did. Martinelli reveals he had been having an affair with Chastity since high school, and they were together at the cabin the night of the murder. Aphrodite burst in with a camera, intending to photograph the affair as leverage to maintain access to her grandchildren. A violent argument erupted, and Aphrodite seized the fireplace poker, struck Chastity, and stabbed her repeatedly. Martinelli called Wild Bill, and together they removed the unconscious Aphrodite, wiped prints, planted blood-soaked clothing in the woodshed, and framed Axel. Lucy arrived at the cabin that night in a dissociative state and saw the carnage, which Wild Bill later used to convince her she was the killer. When Aphrodite awoke the next morning with no memory except a nightmare, she drove to the cabin genuinely believing she had experienced a premonition. Axel's confession sealed the cover-up.

Monroe talks Lucy into lowering the shotgun. Wild Bill grabs it and strikes her, but Monroe punches him to the floor. All three are taken into custody, and Dross tells Cork that Axel will be a free man.

On the first night of the new year, Axel sits at a fire ring on Crow Point, surrounded by family and the O'Connor clan. Henry Meloux, an elderly Mide, or healer, who has guided Cork since childhood, performs a ceremony welcoming Axel by his Ojibwe spirit name and inviting him to join the healing work at Crow Point. Axel accepts. Cork reflects on the blessing of family, a bond about much more than shared blood.