Tag Archives: Michael Koryta

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Silent Hour,’ by Michael Koryta

Leave a comment

“I’ve got to live with that,” he said, “and all I can do, the only way I know to cope with it, is by looking for atonement. Because while his blood might be on my hands, I didn’t kill him—and if I can see that whoever did kill him is punished? Perry, that’s the closest thing I’ve got to redemption.”

The Lincoln Perry detective series by Michael Koryta comes to an end with The Silent Hour – though the conclusion is open-ended, and I imagine there could be more coming down the line.

The great pleasure in these books, I think, is the plotting – these are the kinds of stories where you think you have the solutions, and then further mysteries open up, like petals in a flower, till you finally reach the shocking heart of things. In this case – and I may be being pretentious here – I thought I saw the same thing going on, on a subtextual level, making this a meta-mystery.

Lincoln Perry has had a rough time in his most recent big cases. He got his partner shot and nearly killed. He got his girlfriend into danger. He isn’t much interested when a quiet man named Parker Harrison comes to him – repeatedly – asking him to look into a twelve-year-old mystery. A couple named Cantrell had run a rehabilitation program for ex-convicts – one of whom was Harrison himself. Twelve years ago they disappeared. Harrison wants to find out what happened to them.

Lincoln isn’t much interested in the case – even less so when he learns that the missing wife was sister to one of Cleveland’s chief crime lords. But Harrison gets through to him at last. He agrees to look into it.

Before too long, someone Lincoln likes is dead. Lincoln goes sour, not only on the case, but on the very idea of being a private investigator. Should he just pack it in? Is the game worth the candle?

The question is an existential one – why do we feel the need to solve mysteries? To learn the truth? At what cost? Is it worth people’s lives?

I wish there were more Lincoln Perry novels to read after The Silent Hour. As it is, I’ll go on to other Michael Koryta novels, as well as his Scott Carson books.

I wish he’d work out his paragraph protocols, though. The breaks in the text are unnecessarily confusing.

Fiction, Reviews

‘A Welcome Grave,’ by Michael Koryta

Leave a comment

I’ve reached Book 3 in Michael Koryta’s Lincoln Perry detective series, A Welcome Grave. Lincoln, our hero, has a girlfriend whom he loves, but he also has a past. Once he was engaged to a woman, but she broke it off, later marrying an older, millionaire lawyer. Lincoln responded in character – he punched the guy in the face, ending his own police career.

Now, years later, that man is dead – tortured to death. Lincoln gets a call from the widow, who wants him to locate her stepson, who ran off some time ago and has a substantial inheritance coming. Lincoln isn’t happy about the job, but feels obligated to take it. He finds the young man, too – but he’s not prepared for his shocking reaction. Nor is he prepared for the local cop who decides that Lincoln Perry will be the chief suspect in the father’s murder case. Suspicions are increased as clue after clue pops up to frame him, neatly orchestrated. Lincoln will have to work fast, and be very smart, to keep out of jail. And then the stakes will be raised yet again.

The Lincoln Perry books are simply very good. Well written and engaging. There’s plenty of action, but the emphasis is on the characters.

A Welcome Grave is highly recommended, with the usual cautions for grownup stuff.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Sorrow’s Anthem,’ by Michael Koryta

Leave a comment

I am finding, in Michael Koryta’s Lincoln Perry novels, a pleasure I haven’t enjoyed (at least to this extent) since I first read Andrew Klavan’s under-appreciated Weiss/Bishop novels – a series of free-standing stories that nevertheless form a larger, coherent narrative in which the main characters develop. Sorrow’s Anthem is the second book in the series.

Ed Gradduk and Lincoln Perry were best friends as boys. They lived in the same neighborhood, played together, made mischief together. But Lincoln grew up to be a cop, then a private investigator, while Ed got into trouble and went to prison. Worse than that, it was Lincoln who sent him down. He didn’t mean to – he offered him a chance to get off if he’d testify against his associates, but Ed kept mum and did his time.

But now he’s out and in trouble again, charged with murder and arson. Lincoln goes to look for him, and finds him. But Ed has something he wants to explain before Lincoln takes him in. Except that he’s dead before he can finish his story. Agonized by his guilt over failing his old friend, Lincoln sets about discovering Ed’s secret, and the reason why someone thought he had to die. He’ll find himself up against crooked cops, crooked politicians, and organized crime before he blows it all open.

Koryta writes a great story. He generally doesn’t produce the kind of memorable prose that makes Raymond Chandler or John D. MacDonald so quotable, but every line does its job and the final effect goes directly to the heart.

My only quibbles are first (as I’ve mentioned before) paragraph breaks are inconsistent and confusing. Prose of this quality deserves better page setup. Also, Koryta is one of those writers who thinks a semiautomatic pistol uses a “clip” rather than a magazine.

Doesn’t matter, though. These are great books, and Sorrow’s Anthem is a great (and memorable) read.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Tonight I Said Goodbye,’ by Michael Koryta

2 Comments

I’ve been pretty impressed with the novelist Michael Koryta, and have enjoyed several of his novels now. Tonight I Said Goodbye is, apparently, his first published novel, and first in his Lincoln Perry detective series. As I read it, I thought – condescendingly – that this was well done, but fairly elementary stuff. I was pretty sure I knew how the plot was going to be resolved.

And all the time I was being taken in. What I thought was happening wasn’t what was happening at all – and the conclusion shocked me like ice water in the face. I was being played by a master.

Lincoln Perry, along with his partner, Joe Pritchard, runs a successful private detective agency in Cleveland, Ohio. They’re not much interested when old John Weston asks them to find his missing daughter-in-law and granddaughter. The case has been all over the media – Weston’s son Wayne (who was, as it happened, a private investigator himself) was found shot to death. The assumption is that he murdered his wife and child, hid the bodies, and then killed himself. John Weston is certain that’s not true. Finally, he goads Lincoln into taking the case.

Wayne Weston, as it turns out, was not as clean as his reputation would have it. He worked almost exclusively for a predatory local property developer, and the names of Russian gangsters keep popping up in the investigation. But it isn’t until Lincoln follows a clue to South Carolina that the case starts exploding around him, and the stakes soar into the sky like rockets.

Tonight I Said Goodbye was a classic detective novel, but better written than most and delightfully unpredictable. I recommend it highly, and look forward to reading the next book in the series.

My only real quibble is poor manuscript setup. For some reason, paragraphs often run together, which can confuse the reader when it happens in dialogue. But that’s probably not the author’s fault.

Fiction, Reviews

‘How It Happened,’ by Michael Koryta

Leave a comment

As Barrett cast off from the dock and motored away from Port Hope, farther out into the bay, toward the open sea, the morning sun was winning the fight with the fog and the breeze had come to its aid, pushing back the fog in long gusts like strokes of a whisk broom.

This Michael Koryta guy is some kind of writer. I haven’t found a dud from his hand yet. How It Happened is a splendid narrative about an imperfect man struggling to find the truth.

Rob Barrett is an FBI agent. He’s young in terms of experience, but has a reputation as an expert on interrogations. He’s sent to the town of Port Hope, Maine, to try to break a missing persons case, because he spent some time there during his troubled youth.

The two missing are a young couple, Jackie Pelletier and Ian Kelly. Jackie is the only daughter of a widowed fisherman, and the light of his life. Ian is the son of a prominent local citizen with political pull – which is why the FBI has been called in.

Rob does what he does, and finds a young woman, Kimmy Crepeaux, who admits to participating in the killing of the two young people, and is eaten up with guilt. She names the murderer as a local handyman with an immaculate reputation – though Rob knows him better than most people and considers him a plausible suspect. But Kimmy is a junky and a loser, a person with no credibility. Nevertheless, Rob gets the police busy searching for the bodies where Kimmy said they’d be – and they are not there. Instead, they show up at last 200 miles away. Rob is disgraced, and exiled to “FBI Siberia” in Montana.

But he can’t give it up. There’s more to the case, he’s certain, and he goes back to Port Hope on his own time, determined to discover what really happened. His informants tell him he’s thinking too small, that the case is way bigger than he suspects. Will he be able to handle the truth once he finds it?

I was impressed with the writing in How It Happened. I was impressed with the characters, the dialogue, and the plot. I was impressed by the depth of the author’s compassion. I enjoyed the book more than I can say.

Highly recommended. Cautions for the usual.

Fiction, Reviews

‘An Honest Man,’ by Michael Koryta

Leave a comment

“The past wasn’t all a lie, and the future isn’t all hopeless,” he went on. “That’s the way people on that island feel now, like they’re in one camp or the other. Either everything was bad or everything will be bad, right?”

It’s pretty rare for me to embrace a book whose message I’m not sure I like. But such is the power of Michael Koryta’s An Honest Man. (I reviewed another book called An Honest Man the other day. This was the result of a confusion on my part, when I was attempting to buy this one.) It’s a beautiful book that will linger with the reader.

Israel Pike went to prison some years back for killing his own father in a fit of rage. Now he’s paroled and back in his home, the moribund community of Salvation Point Island off the Maine coast. He has almost no friends there, not even his uncle, the assistant sheriff, who in fact hates him and is trying to find an excuse to send him back to prison.

One morning Israel sees a yacht drifting offshore, and rows out to check on it. Inside he finds the bodies of seven men, all shot to death. Naturally, Israel’s uncle points to him as the most likely suspect, but he can’t pin it on him.

But there are things Israel isn’t telling the police. He has secrets, and he knows more than he’s telling. But then, the whole community is hiding its own wicked secrets.

Meanwhile, a young boy named Lyman Rankin is living on a smaller, nearby island with his alcoholic, abusive father. When Lyman discovers a wounded young woman hiding in an abandoned house nearby, he puts himself at risk to help her and keep her secret. A bond develops between the two, even as his father grows increasingly suspicious and brutal.

An Honest Man is not only an exciting and well-constructed thriller. It’s also a heartbreakingly beautiful story about truth and beauty. It moved me deeply.

It also troubled me. One theme of this story seemed to be that lying is not only permissible, but admirable, in the right situation. (I’d like to hear the author debate Jordan Peterson, who says lies invariably come back to bite you.)

On the other hand, another theme seems to be that big, widespread, agreed-upon lies are wicked and must be brought to light.

In any case, An Honest Man was an amazing book to read. I give it the highest recommendation. Cautions for all you’d expect.