“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.