[4] Krueger has said that he wanted to be a writer from the third grade when his story "The Walking Dictionary" was praised by his teacher and parents.

[5] Throughout his early life, he supported himself by logging timber, digging ditches, working in construction, and being published as a freelance journalist; he never stopped writing.

[5] He wrote short stories and sketches for many years, but it was not until the age of 40 that he finished the manuscript of his first novel, Iron Lake.

He grew up reading Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and James T. Farrell.

[5]As a mystery genre writer, Krueger credits Tony Hillerman and James Lee Burke as his strongest influences.

Rising at 5:30 am, he would go to the nearby St. Clair Broiler, where he would drink coffee and write longhand in wire-bound notebooks.

When Krueger decided to set the series in northern Minnesota, he realized that a large percentage of the population was of mixed ancestry.

Collectively, a people squashed it as easily as stepping on a daisy.Krueger has read the first Ojibwe historian, William Whipple Warren, Gerald Vizenor and Basil Johnston.