The Billings airport was built on a plateau above the city, and while the mountains were far off in the hazy distance, the big sky was right there on top of you. The Montana sky felt older than time and endless as space itself.

It was a humbling sky.

Pushing on through the second book in Michael Koryta’s Mark Novak series. I was a little disappointed in the previous book, Last Words. Rise the Dark made up for that, and more. The claustrophobia of the first book contrasted with the open heights of the second (Rise the Dark is about mountains and power line towers), lending epic scope to the narrative as a whole.

Markus Novak now knows the name of the man who murdered his wife Lauren. His investigation takes him to the one place he needs to see, but always feared to visit – Cassadaga, Florida, a community founded on spiritualism. Raised by a fraudulent psychic mother, Marcus has always had a horror of psychic claims. But when he goes there, and nearly gets murdered in a burning house, he comes away with the last notation in Lauren’s notebook – the words, “rise the dark,” as well as  a clue as to where the murderer is headed – to a town in Montana where he lived a while as a boy, with his mother and his two outlaw uncles. On the way, he joins forces with a beautiful private detective.

Meanwhile, in Montana, a young wife is kidnapped by the leader of a doomsday cult. Her husband, a power line worker, is informed that if he wants his wife to live, he’ll have to help the cult carry out a major act of sabotage. What no one knows is that he’s lost his nerve. If he is to do this thing he does not want to do, he’ll have to go far beyond his personal limits.

Rise the Dark was an epic story, full of Michael Koryta’s trademark plot twists and surprises. It strays further into the occult than I like, but there’s an ambivalence about the topic that comforted me. It looks like more books are coming, and I look forward to reading them.

I found Rise the Dark highly compelling. Recommended, with the usual cautions.