Iron Lake, by William Kent Krueger

Iron Lake is a pretty good mystery story. Krueger has an easy style which is poetic at times. His main character acts heroically and has a fair amount of introspection through which we learn to identify with him.

There are two areas where Iron Lake could have been better. The first is that the plot became overly complicated at the end in order to tie up lots of loose threads pulled on throughout the novel. At least for me, the various unexplained actions in the middle of the book were confusing enough that I ignored most of them so that when they were tied up at the end I didn't care anymore.

The second issue is that the point-of-view switched to a few other characters for about 5% of the book.  It is disconcerting to have the point of view of the main character for the first quarter of the book, switch to another person's point of view for one single chapter, and then forge on with the main character for another ten chapters. The point-of-view should be constant with one character or should rotate more evenly through two or more characters.

Given that this was his first novel, these flaws are easily overlooked; I plan to read his more recent effort, Ordinary Grace.