I’d noticed the car when I’d arrived three hours earlier. A buddy in high school had owned a similar Camaro without the stripes. We’d loved the car and marveled how something built ten years before we were born could be as cool as we were. I haven’t been cool for twenty years, but the ʼ69 Camaro still is.

Plowing through Matt Coyle’s dark mystery series about Rick Cahill, guilt-ridden, self-destructive private eye in La Jolla, California.

In Wrong Light, Rick is hired by a local radio station manager to protect his station’s big star – Naomi Hendrix, a sultry-voiced nighttime talk show host. Naomi turns out (surprisingly) to be as beautiful as she sounds, but she shuns the public eye. And she’s adamant that the police should not be told about the threatening messages she’s gotten. She has a secret past, and she keeps it close.

At the same time, a Russian Mafia assassin to whom Rick owes a favor instructs him to start a nighttime surveillance. It interferes with his job, but you don’t say no to these people. He knows they’re using him as a pawn in some rotten scheme, and he’ll need to figure out what’s going on before he finds himself the fall guy.

And just when he thinks Naomi Hendrix’s stalker is probably harmless, a girl disappears and Rick’s suspicions begin proving horribly true.

This will not end well.

Things work out okay in some ways, pretty awful in others. I’d list Wrong Light as one of the darker books in this dark series. But I’m sticking with it. I’m really concerned now to see what will happen next.