…He had called on every resource for survival and found that your resources didn’t matter much when you were lost in the dark. You needed help from outside the blackness then. That had been the most unsettling realization of his life. I cannot save myself.

A while back I picked up a novella by Michael Koryta, my latest author enthusiasm. It was called The Last Honest Horse Thief, and told a story about Marcus Novak, a young boy living an itinerant life in the American mountain west. His mother, whom he loved but was ashamed of, was a fraudulent psychic and con woman. The story told how he got a chance at a different life, but chose to go back to her, honoring what he felt to be his responsibility. Like all Koryta stories, it didn’t go where I expected it to, but was satisfying in its own way.

On picking up Last Words, the first book in a series, I discovered that the novella had been a prequel, and that Marcus Novak is the hero here. He’s grown up now, having happily fled the mountains that carried so many bad memories. Now he lives the good life in Florida, as an investigator for a nonprofit foundation that investigates wrongful death penalty convictions. Or rather, it was the good life, until his wife was murdered. Since then he’s been obsessed with discovering her killer – so that he’s close to losing his job.

To get him out of the board of directors’ sight, Marcus’ boss sends him to Indiana, to investigate a case that doesn’t even match their organizational criteria. Ten years ago, a teenaged girl was lost in a cave. An eccentric local spelunker brought her dead body out, claiming he’d lost any memory of finding her. Public opinion agrees that this man must have murdered her, but there’s no evidence, and he’s never been charged or convicted. He is, in fact, the one who asked the foundation to send an investigator, to settle the truth once and for all.

Marcus has no interest in going to Indiana, and doesn’t care about the case. The secret lies in the cave, and he doesn’t like caves. The secret also involves a hypnotist, and he doesn’t trust hypnotists. Still, he will get drawn into it, and dark truths will be revealed.

I’m afraid I was a little disappointed in Last Words. The writing, as always with Koryta, was good. But I found the hero kind of passive. He got drawn into things against his will, and although he was tested in a major way, I wasn’t sure what he learned from it. But the big thing was that I wasn’t greatly surprised by the solution. I expect more surprises from Michael Koryta.

Also, there’s a lot of hypnotism in the story. I’m skeptical of hypnotism myself (someone tried to put me under once, but I’m a bad subject), and I thought the claims here were implausible.

But I’ll stay with the series. Last Words was all right, just not the author’s best work. In my opinion.