Available:*
Library | Audience | Home Location | Material Type | Shelf Number | Status |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Searching... Central | Adult | Open Stacks Fiction | Open Stacks book | KORYT | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Kendall | Adult | Fiction | Book | KORYT | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
Sometime after midnight, on a moonless October night turned harsh by a fine, windswept rain, one of the men I liked least in the world was murdered in a field near Bedford, just south of the city... .The detectives went looking for suspects - people whose histories with Jefferson were adversarial and hostile. At the top of that list, they found me.  So begins A Welcome Grave, the third novel by award-winning mystery writer Michael Koryta, featuring private investigator Lincoln Perry. Once a rising star on the Cleveland police force, Perry ended his career when he left one of the city''s prominent attorneys, Alex Jefferson, bleeding in the parking lot of his country club - retribution for his affair with Perry''s fiancée. Now Jefferson is dead, the victim of a brutal murder, and his widow has called upon Perry for a favor he knows he shouldn''t accept but can''t turn down: to find Jefferson''s estranged son, partial beneficiary of the dead man''s fortune. The case is simple enough, a routine "locate," and he''ll be paid plenty of money for the work. The encounter should be simple, too: a brief exchange of information and maybe an empty condolence before Perry gets back into his truck and returns home. Instead, he''s loaded into a police car and taken to a rural jail while Jefferson''s son is zipped into a body bag. Perry soon learns that Jefferson''s millions are the target of a thirst for revenge that hasn''t been satisfied by blood. As a pair of deadly assailants push deep into the investigator''s life, they bring with them police from two states who are determined to see Perry in jail. Building on the skill that prompted the Toronto Sun to call him "one of America''s best young mystery writers," Michael Koryta makes A Welcome Grave an intense exploration of the lengths to which a desperate man is forced to go in order to clear his name and solve a crime. This is a thrilling new book that justifies the critical acclaim and solidifies his role as an emerging talent among today''s top writers. Praise for Michael Koryta A WELCOME GRAVE "For a while now, Michael Koryta has been called one of the rising young talents in crime fiction. I say enough of that. A Welcome Grave proves the promise. Koryta is one of the best of the best, plain and simple. With stories like this, his Lincoln Perry is going to be around for a long, long time." - Michael Connelly, author of The Overlook and the bestselling Harry Bosch series "With the publication of A Welcome Grave, it''s time to stop referring to Michael Koryta as a boy wonder and just focus on the sheer wonder of his storytelling. Koryta knows how to put his characters - and his readers - into an ever-tightening vise of twists, turns, and conspiracies, but it''s his empathy that makes his work stand out. This is a nuanced, mature novel that proves both the depth of Koryta''s talent and the vitality of the PI genre." - Laura Lippman, Edgar Award winner and author of No Good Deeds "In the last few years, new writing talent has entered all subgenres of crime fiction. One of the names at the top of the list is Michael Koryta. He is a breath of fresh air, his writing is clear and concise, and his observations on the darkness of the human condition show how the PI novel is one of the finest forms in all of fiction writing. Mr. Koryta is on his way to being a master of the PI novel, sacred ground indeed." - Richard Katz, Mystery One Bookstore SORROW''S ANTHEM " Sorrow''s Anthem is no sophomore slump." - The Washington Post "Koryta displays the maturity of a writer with several novels under his belt, and his plot percolates with crisp dialogue that might impress Chandler himself." - Booklist (starred review) TONIGHT I SAID GOODBYE "Say hello to a new crime talent." - Chicago Tribune "[Koryta] has produced what few thought possible - an incredibly fresh PI novel when the subgenre had been long declared fatigued...Koryta emerges fully formed in his first effort." - The Baltimore Sun
Author Notes
While still in high school, Michael Koryta worked as a newspaper reporter and for a private investigator. His first book, Tonight I Said Goodbye, was published when he was twenty-one years old and an undergraduate at Indiana University. It won the Great Lakes Book Award for best mystery. Envy the Night won the 2008 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for best mystery/thriller. He is the author of the Lincoln Perry series and teaches at the Indiana University School of Journalism.
Koryta's book Those Who Wish Me Dead made the Nwe York Time bestseller list in 2014.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Koryta's third Lincoln Perry novel is given a first-rate rendition by Scott Brick. Originally published in 2007, A Welcome Grave, like other titles in the series, chronicles an investigation that involves the private detective personally as well as professionally. Here, he's hired by his ex-fiancee to locate the estranged son of Alex Jefferson, her recently murdered husband, the same husband Perry once battered, leading to his dismissal from the Cleveland police force. Brick adds a shade of guilt to the detective's already downbeat first-person account. And when Perry is framed for murder by a pair of brilliant, homicidal (and sinister-voiced) villains, a tone of frustration and near hopelessness completes the well-performed vocal portrait. Brick is especially successful in voicing the supporting players, capturing the halting uncertainty of Perry's partner, Joe Pritchard, wounded in body and spirit from a previous adventure, and a hint of honor in the heavily accented, unemotional speech of Thor, a cold-blooded Russian mob enforcer who assists Perry in a time of need. A St. Martin's paperback. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Twenty-three-year-old Koryta was nominated for a 2005 Edgar for his first Lincoln Perry novel Tonight I Said Goodbye (2004). Though Koryta was a criminal-justice major in college, his lean prose would do any English department proud. In this third installment in the series, Perry, a Cleveland cop-turned-PI, faces his most personal case: the brutal slaying of Alex Jefferson, a lawyer who married Karen, Perry's one-time fiancee. Perry's grudge against Jefferson is no secret; he once assaulted the attorney and lost his police badge as a result. In the wake of Jefferson's murder, Karen hires Perry to find the victim's long-estranged son. Perry soon finds himself the chief suspect in Jefferson's murder, framed by a pair of nefarious souls with both motive and means. Perry's gruff but shrewd partner, Joe (also a former cop), proves instrumental in the investigation. But since taking a bullet to the shoulder, he is not so sure he wants to return to his job full-time. Koryta's villains occasionally border on caricature, but that does little to distract from this otherwise top-notch thriller. --Allison Block Copyright 2007 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
"HELP me run away." Those words, encountered in a new thriller by Thomas Perry, are enough to make any attentive reader swoon. Perry is the grand poobah of the running-away narrative, with its trapdoor escape mechanisms, elaborate chase sequences and unsettling identity issues, and he's at the top of his cat-and-mouse game in SILENCE (Harcourt, $25). Jack Till, a Los Angeles private eye with a knack for hiding people in trouble, once gave a crash course in the requisite survival skills to Wendy Harper, the co-owner of a trendy restaurant who was murderously assaulted after she tried to investigate the disappearance of a popular waitress with a sinister admirer. "I told her the methods professionals might use to find her" is Till's modest recollection of the tutorial he gave the traumatized restaurateur. "And then I taught her ways to avoid those methods." That's the last Till hears of Wendy until six years later, when the district attorney's office arrests Eric Fuller, her onetime business partner and the celebrity chef at the restaurant, for her presumed murder. Although Till suspects the homicide charge is just a gambit to flush out Wendy, engineered by someone who still considers her a threat, he feels ethically bound to invade his former pupil's new life - if he can reach her before her would-be assassins. Thomas Perry The clever procedures Perry devises for this quest - which quickly escalate from standard computer searches into a series of highway chases at once dazzling and dizzying, especially for the punishing mistreatment of countless innocent rental cars - would be a treat to follow under any circumstances. But Perry's inventiveness isn't limited to the situational mechanics of the plot, and his complex characters, including a pair of insanely appealing villains, are all the more attractive for being so devious and untrustworthy. Paul and Sylvie Turner, the husband-and-wife contract killers hired to make sure Wendy doesn't get a chance to identify the person she saw manhandling that waitress, are inspired creations. Tall, lithe and emotionally bloodless, they enjoy having sex, dancing the tango and killing people, and are exceedingly adept at all these activities. As satanic foils for Till and Wendy, they keep up the maniacal pace in this deadly game - and manage to show those straight shooters a thing or two about maintaining a high style. In her latest solemnly perceptive mystery, THE INDIAN BRIDE (Harcourt, $23), Karin Possum continues her exploration of the way violent crime can crack open the unwritten laws and social taboos of rural Norway. Like his neighbors in the tiny farming community of Elvestad, Gunder Jomann keeps his private affairs to himself; but when this decent and dependable fellow decides it's time to marry, he reveals his secret romantic side by flying to India to find a wife he can cherish. (In his experience, "Norwegian women didn't want to be adored.") Although his brave heart wins Gunder a fair lady, she is lost forever - savagely beaten to death in a meadow just outside town - when an emergency keeps him from meeting her plane. Inspector Konrad Sejer's calm, contemplative manner reflects his dual functions in this series as both a detective and an unofficial psychologist. He understands the howling grief behind Gunder's numbed disbelief (all the more devastating in the unadorned idiom of Charlotte Barslund's translation), but it takes more subtle thought to interpret a cafe owner's surliness or a schoolgirl's eagerness to be a murder witness. What it takes is a writer like Fossum, able to see into the soul of an entire village. Being a tough private eye is no summer sail across the bay. Genre conventions demand that the hero be randomly beaten up by thugs, irrationally hounded by cops and betrayed by transparently untrustworthy women. Michael Koryta writes himself into these and other corners in A WELCOME GRAVE (St. Martin's Minotaur, $23.95), his third novel to feature Lincoln Perry, a licensed P.I. who lives above the gym he owns in downtown Cleveland. There's a noir opaqueness to Perry's latest case, which has him working for an ex-fiancée now married to a powerful lawyer who has just been found tortured to death, a fate the lawyer's son has avoided by shooting himself in the mouth. While Koryta doesn't bring a whole lot of originality to the sadomasochistic plot, he writes chunks of stylish prose about characters so well observed that they could step right out of this cheesy story and slip into something more comfortable. Every historical mystery tries to home in on the ideal setting at the perfect moment in time. Anthony Flacco succeeds on both counts in his first novel, THE LAST NIGHTINGALE (Ballantine, paper, $12.95), which opens on April 18, 1906, at 5:12 a.m. - the exact second of the first shock wave of the great San Francisco earthquake. The heaving streets, the burning buildings, the screams of the victims: Flacco imagines the chaos in precise and vivid detail while contributing his own distinctive narrative touch. It seems the quake has provided cover for a serial killer, and while the city struggles to save itself, 12-year-old Shane Nightingale is more intent on finding the madman, who murdered his family. Once Shane crosses paths with Sgt. Randall Blackburn, who has also made it his business to catch the killer known as "the Surgeon," man and boy discover that they make an unorthodox but efficient team. And who knows - once they overcome fire, pestilence, lawlessness and the other legacies of the earthquake to vanquish this monster, there could be more work for such a dynamic duo. The private eye hero of Thomas Perry's latest thriller once helped a woman disappear - but now he has to find her.
Kirkus Review
A hard-boiled shamus knows better than to answer the distress call of his ex...or does he? Police pay a visit to Cleveland gym owner and sometime private eye Lincoln Perry (Sorrow's Anthem, 2006, etc.) when wealthy Alex Jefferson is found in a dumpster, the victim of torture and murder. Jefferson's widow Karen is Perry's ex, and the last time he saw Jefferson, he beat him to a pulp at Jefferson's country club. A week later, Karen calls Perry, and against his better judgment, he goes to see her. Jefferson left a huge estate, much of it to his missing son Matthew. So Karen hires Perry to find her estranged stepson and give him the news. When Perry tracks Matthew down in Indiana, the young man pulls a gun but uses it to commit suicide, making Perry again a murder suspect until forensics clears him. Teaming at times with Cleveland detective Harold Targent, Perry sets out to discover Matthew's secret in hopes of identifying Jefferson's killer. A violent ex-con named Andy Doran may hold the key. Many twists await along the way, with Perry himself never far from the dubious status of prime suspect, much of the evidence apparently designed to frame him. The plot has its share of boilerplate elements. But sentence for polished sentence, no one in the genre writes better. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
A routine "locate" to find the estranged son of a murdered Cleveland attorney gets P.I. Lincoln Perry behind bars in the third series title. Koryta lives in Bloomington, IN. With a regional tour. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.