Review by New York Times Review
I'M always stumped when someone asks me to find them "a good mystery," because I might recommend a serial killer thriller like Jo Nesbo's fiendishly clever novel THE SNOWMAN (Knopf, $25.95) to someone hankering for a civilized British detective story like Peter Lovesey's STAGESTRUCK (Soho Crime, $25). So let's play favorites - but pick your poison first. FAVORITE BOOK The final exit of a beloved sleuth is the focal point of my choice: THE TROUBLED MAN (Knopf, $26.95). Henning Mankell makes it clear that his brilliant if chronically depressed Swedish detective, Kurt Wallander, has solved his last case. In the course of investigating a political conspiracy that dates back to the cold war, Wallander comes to realize "how little he actually knew about the world he had lived in" and how inadequate his efforts to fix that broken world have proved. Although it accounts for his perpetual mood of despair, that insight also makes him a hero for this age of anxiety. FAVORITE NEW SLEUTH George Pelecanos's new protagonist. Spero Lucas, is not only younger and friskier than most private eyes, he's also untainted by the cynicism that goes with the profession. Making his first appearance in THE CUT (Reagan Arthur/Little, Brown, $25.99), Lucas brings his lusty appetites and taste for danger to a vivid narrative about gang wars in Washington, D.C. The big question: Can Pelecanos keep his young hero from flaming out? FAVORITE DEBUT NOVEL/FAVORITE ACTION THRILLER Sebastian Rotella scores twice for TRIPLE CROSSING (Mulholland/Little, Brown, $24.99), which begins on the San Diego-Tijuana border and sends good guys from both sides of the fence to combat drug smugglers and terrorists in the badlands of South America. FAVORITE COZY That would be A TRICK OF THE LIGHT (Minotaur, $25.99), Louise Penny's mystery starring Armand Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec and set in the enchanting village of Three Pines. FAVORITE REGIONAL MYSTERY In SHOCK WAVE (Putnam, $27.95), John Sandford drags Virgil Flowers away from an all-girls volleyball tournament and dispatches him to Butternut Falls, where a bomber is intent on keeping out a big-box store. FAVORITE SUSPENSE NOVEL Cara Hoffman takes on rural poverty, domestic abuse and teenage violence in her first novel, SO MUCH PRETTY (Simon & Schuster, $25), which watches a family of urbanites come to grief in upstate New York. Runner-up is another novel on the same theme: BENT ROAD (Dutton, $25.95), in which Lori Roy observes the breakdown of a family that has moved to Kansas to escape racial tensions in 1960s Detroit. FAVORITE MYSTERY WITH A SOCIAL CONSCIENCE A tie between THE END OF THE WASP SEASON (Reagan Arthur/ Little, Brown, $25.99), by Denise Mina, and THE BOY IN THE SUITCASE (Soho, $24), by the Danish authors Lene Kaaberbol and Agnete Friis. Mina's gritty Glasgow procedural features a female cop who takes pity on a 15-year-old killer because she's witnessed the neglect that can produce such damaged children. The criminal mistreatment of children is also the focus of the Danish thriller, which follows the efforts of a nurse to identify the 3-year-old boy she rescues at the Copenhagen train station. FAVORITE NOIR Antiheroes don't get much darker than the protagonist of James Sallis's moody existential mystery, THE KILLER IS DYING (Walker, $24), a hit man who wants to make one last clean kill before he dies. But I have to go with the rogue Scott Phillips introduces in THE ADJUSTMENT (Counterpoint, $25). This prince of a fellow made a killing pimping and working the black market as an Army quartermaster in Rome during World War II. But peacetime life in Wichita is so dull it takes all his ingenuity to come up with a new way to make a dishonest living. FAVORITE SUPERNATURAL MYSTERY Michael Koryta easily takes top honors for two eerie novels, THE CYPRESS HOUSE (Little, Brown, $24.99), a 1930s gangster story with spooky undertones, and THE RIDGE (Little, Brown, $24.99), a ghost story set in an old mining region of Kentucky. FAVORITE HISTORICAL MYSTERY If the category were narrowed to World War II-era novels, it would be a tossup between FIELD GRAY (Marian Wood/Putnam, $26.95), the darkest of Philip Kerr's Berlin stories, and David Downing's POTSDAM STATION (Soho, $25), with its horrific scenes of Berlin falling to the Red Army. But in an open field, top honors go to C.J. Sansom for HEARTSTONE (Viking, $27.95), a Tudor mystery that captures the chaotic state of England in the aftermath of Henry VIII's ill-conceived invasion of France. FAVORITE PERFORMANCE BY AN OLD PRO That's a tough one in a year that saw top-drawer work from Michael Connelly in THE FIFTH WITNESS (Little, Brown, $27.99). James Lee Burke in FEAST DAY OF FOOLS (Simon & Schuster, $26.99) and Thomas Perry in THE INFORMANT (Otto Penzler/ Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $27). Sue Grafton earns special mention for keeping Kinsey Millhone engaged and endearing through her 22nd alphabet mystery, V IS FOR VENGEANCE (Marian Wood/Putnam, $27.95). But for sentimental reasons, I'm going with Lawrence Block's nostalgic novel, A DROP OF THE HARD STUFF (Mulholland/ Little, Brown, $25.99), set in New York in the 1970s, when Matt Scudder was still a working cop and crime was still "the leading occupation" in his Hell's Kitchen neighborhood.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 4, 2012]
Review by Booklist Review
In Blade Ridge, Kentucky, a man named Wyatt, notorious for his alcohol consumption and troubled past, makes two phone calls one to Kevin Kimble, a police officer, and the other to Roy Darmus, a newspaper reporter during which he rambles on about murder and suicide. Soon after, he's discovered dead in his home, an old lighthouse in the middle of nowhere, and police find that the place is awash in curious, unsettling remnants of the dead man's life. Most curious are the photographs stuck to the walls, many of them quite old, and the maps with names written on them in red ink. When Darmus discovers one of the photos is of his long-dead parents, and Kimble is forced to confront the possibility that an incident from his own past might not be a secret anymore, they begin to wonder what tragic local history Wyatt had tapped into and whether the horror is just beginning. Koryta, who's been a newspaper reporter and a private investigator, gets deep inside the minds of his protagonists, and the story is intriguing and frequently spooky. It's a good book, effectively blending crime and horror, although an author like Graham Masterton might have given the horror side a bit more oomph. Still, this one will definitely cross over to fans of both genres. . HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Koryta's crime-horror genre-benders, beginning with So Cold the River (2010), have secured the author of the Lincoln Perry PI novels a new and larger audience. Expect the trend to continue here.--Pitt, Davi. Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
A rural Kentucky community becomes the unlikely focal point for a series of enigmatic and terrifying events in Koryta's subtle supernatural thriller. When local drunk Wyatt French, who inexplicably built a wooden lighthouse far from any large body of water, calls Kevin Kimble, the county's chief deputy, and asks whether he'd investigate a suicide, Kimble, who's driving in his car to visit a prison inmate, refers French to a suicide hotline. Soon after, reporter Roy Darmus, whose newspaper has just folded, receives an unsettling call from French that prompts Darmus to go to the lighthouse, where he finds the man has apparently shot himself in the mouth. French's death may be connected with an eerie blue light seen in the vicinity of Blade Ridge, a phenomenon that riles the big cats residing in a wildlife refuge that's just set up shop on property adjoining French's. Koryta (The Cypress House) matches an original and complex plot line with prose full of understated menace. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Koryta (The Cypress House; So Cold the River) delivers another supernatural thriller with punch. The lives of a small-town chief deputy, an out-of-work reporter, and the owner of a big cat rescue center collide when a well-known eccentric dies in his landlocked lighthouse, set on a ridge in the eastern Kentucky hills. Strange occurrences at the cat shelter coincide with a disturbing discovery in the lighthouse, which hits too close to home for the deputy and veteran reporter, and being on the ridge after dark becomes dangerous. Part ghost story, part murder mystery, all thriller, this fast-paced and engaging read will have readers leaving the night-light on long after they have finished the book. Verdict Mystery readers, supernatural thriller lovers, and horror buffs who can live without gore all will appreciate Koryta's latest effort. [See Prepub Alert, 12/13/10.]-Colleen S. Harris, Univ. of Tennessee at Chattanooga Lib. (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The choice is simple: Kill or be killed.Wyatt French blasted himself to smithereens with his shotgun. But before he died, he contacted Kimble, a Shipley, Ky., sheriff, and Darmus, a reporter for theSawyer County Sentinel,and asked them to consider whether he really committed suicide. A strange request, perhaps, but Wyatt was a strange man, who for unspecified reasons built a lighthouse miles away from the sea and even equipped it with ultraviolet beams when his new neighbors at the big-cat rescue center complained that its light upset their animals. In the course of investigating Wyatt's lair, lights unfortunately get broken and strange things begin to happen. A black puma escapes the compound, a keeper is mauled, a deputy magically gets up and walks away when his car is totaled and an eerie blue glow bobbles through the woods. Even stranger, Wyatt seems to have plastered the walls of the lighthouse with pictures of murderers and accident victims, some dating back to the 1880s, when 16 men died constructing the Whitman trestle nearby. At length, Kimble and Darmus realize their pasts also include fateful accidents that occurred near the trestle. Meanwhile, the big cats grow more restless and the blue light appears more often. The final confrontation will cause Kimble to make the ultimate sacrifice.Koryta (The Cypress House,2011, etc.), whose affection for the big cats and those who care for them is contagious, has produced a supernatural thriller that will raise goosebumps the size of golf balls.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
