"Heaven's Keep," the latest episode in William Kent Krueger's ongoing saga of sometimes-northern-Minnesota-lawman Cork O'Connor is released today.

Krueger, whose work has won a loyal following and four Minnesota Book Awards, sends O'Connor into the mountains of Wyoming this time. He summarizes the plot on his website:

When the charter plane carrying Jo O'Connor goes down in a remote area of the Rocky Mountains during an early winter snowstorm, Cork rushes to join the search and rescue effort. He's soon drawn into a dangerous web of deceit and corruption that takes him to the rugged, isolated outback of Wyoming and forces him into deadly confrontations with law officers on the take, Indians with expensive secrets to hide, and cold-blooded hit men with a contract to fulfill. In the midst of the danger and deception lies the hope that Jo's disappearance was not the last of her, and that somewhere along the labyrinthine path of his search, perhaps in the dark shadow of the mountainous and formidable Heaven's Keep itself, Cork will find her alive and waiting for him.

The launch party for the book is Wednesday, 7 p.m., at Once Upon a Crime bookstore, 604 W. 26th St., Minneapolis.

Another Minnesota author -- my wife, Julie Kramer -- interviewed Krueger about his life and characters for the International Thriller Writers website.

A sample:

You've led an interesting work life, including being a logger; share your path to publication with us.

The best jobs I ever had (before I became a full-time writer) were all physically labor intensive. I was kicked out of Stanford University for some pretty radical activities. I wasn't inclined to return to academia, so I spent some time logging timber -- I was what was called "a limber and bucker" -- in the mountains of southern Colorado. For many years after that, I worked construction. When we moved to Minnesota so that my wife could attend law school, I began working as a bureaucrat. But all this time, what I really wanted to be was a writer, and I was always writing, but without any particular goal in mind. At forty, I hit my midlife crisis, sat down, and began focused work on the manuscript that eventually became Iron Lake, my first published novel.