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.