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Festival Ruska celebrates the arrival of the fall colors with events that also highlight Finnish-American heritage.
District Court Judge Mark Munger of Duluth, Minnesota visited the Copper Country Monday for a book signing of his latest book–Boomtown.
Set in northern Minnesota, Boomtown is a legal thriller and murder mystery about copper-nickel mining and the controversies between environmentalists and those seeking to establish new mines.
Author Mark Munger said, “The extractive industries, just like here in the U.P.—mining, timber, etc.—they’re kind of the lifeblood of northern Minnesota and, so, the concept of whether or not we’re going to have some new mining going on with copper-nickel, which we’ve never done in northern Minnesota, that intrigued me.”
Munger was a trial lawyer for 18 years and has been a judge for 18 years. Though Boomtown is a work of fiction, much of it is based in his own experience as well as what’s currently going on in Minnesota.
Munger said, “The court process, the police procedural process, because we’re talking about a murder mystery. Two workers die at this mine and how did it happen? Who did it? Is it an environmental terrorist? Is it an accident? Those kinds of things. So, all of that is brought in to the story as part of the truth.”
Boomtown was just released last week and is now available at North Wind Books in Hancock.
For a complete list of Festival Ruska events, visit http://www.finlandia.edu/events/
