Leaving behind a stressful law enforcement career to become a private investigator in his small Minnesota hometown, Cork O'Connor is asked by an Ojibwe healer to help him find the son the man fathered years earlier, a case that culminates in an attempt on the Ojibwe's life.

Aurora is a small town nestled in the ancient forest alongside the shores of Minnesota's Iron Lake. In the summer of 1963, it is the whole world to twelve-year-old Cork O'Connor, its rhythms as familiar as his own heartbeat. But when Cork stumbles upon the body of a man he revered hanging from a tree in an abandoned logging camp, it is the first in a series of events that will cause him to question everything he took for granted about his hometown,...

When bakery owner Hannah Swensen stumbles upon a dead body floating in the new health club's jacuzzi with a plate of her cream puffs--purchased by her boyfriend--decorating the crime scene, she suddenly has a lot on her plate.

As two neighboring towns--Barron, the home to a powerful corporation, and St. Croix, the town that suffers from the corporation's pollution--are locked in a feud, a St. Croix girl is accused of killing the daughter of the corporation's president.

Hannah Swensen thinks she killed a former high school football hero with her car, until an autopsy reveals the victim was dead before Hannah even hit him, his shirt covered in stains from a blackberry pie.

"Not even Lake Eden's nosiest residents suspected Hannah Swensen would go from idealistic newlywed to betrayed wife in a matter of weeks. But as a deadly mystery unfolds in town, the proof is in the pudding. When The Cookie Jar becomes the setting of a star-studded TV special about movies filmed in Minnesota, Hannah hopes to shine the spotlight on her bakery--not the unsavory scandal swirling around her personal life. But that's practically impossible...

Cork O'Connor is called in to investigate when a deadly explosion rocks the lumber mill of Karl Lindstrom, a wealthy, anti-environmentalist industrialist, whose mill is near an ancient tract of pine forest sacred to the Anishinaabe tribe. .

A tough Minnesota winter brings many changes to Kirsten's frontier life, including the new responsibility of helping her brother Lars set his traps and a move into a new house for her family.