Michael Koryta

This is the second book to feature investigator Mark Novak following “Last Words”. He’s still reeling from the death of his wife & searching for Garland Webb, the man who killed her. He eventually crosses paths with Jay Baldwin who has his own reasons for hating Webb. But neither man is prepared for the evil they’ll encounter.

The opening pages grab you by the throat & the pace rarely lets up. At the heart of the story is a dangerous man intent on establishing a new world order. His show more charisma sucks other disenfranchised souls into his grand scheme to bring the government to its knees.

For Mark, it’s also a deeply personal journey that brings him face to face with his past & the family he walked away from years ago. He’s a sympathetic MC struggling to move on with his life & what he learns in this outing makes him question everything he thought he knew.

Chapters alternate between characters so we’re privy to their thoughts & actions. There’s a significant paranormal element to the story so you’ll have to be on board with things like symbolic dreams, precognition & chats with the dead to fully engage with the plot. The last half takes place in small, dying towns & remote locations in Montana which adds to the sense of isolation & paranoia.

While most threads are tied up by the end, some are left dangling to give fans hope they’ll have another chance to catch up with Mark Novak. A well written & fast paced thriller. show less

Michael Koryta hasn't disappointed me yet, and although this was my first foray into his supernaturally flavored work, that still holds true. A blend of historical horror, suspense, and even somewhat western-y, The Cypress House isn't remotely what I expected, but by the end, I was hooked.

First, I should mention the reasons I was surprised, because the book's back cover set me up for some expectations that ended up making the read not quite what it should have been. If I'd known more about show more the book (and by 'more' I mean fairly basic elements), I might have read it at a different time, but I probably would have enjoyed it more. First is timing and the historical element. From the back cover of my paperback copy, there's no way to know that the book--in its entirety--is set in the 1930s. We're not talking a few flashbacks, but the whole story, and that timing definitely flavors the story. I also picked up the book in this moment partly because I was in the mood to read a very 'Florida' book, and the idea of a thriller set against the background of a hurricane sounded ideal for the moment. Based on the back cover copy, I expected a hurricane to play a fairly large role in the story and for a lot of the story to be set against the hurricane. While it certainly affects the story, however, it's relatively fast in the timespan of the novel, and not at all what I was expecting.

As a result of the mismatched expectations I had--I really have to be in the mood for historical work, but wasn't, and I'd gone looking for a story set against a storm that was already over--I got taken out of the book pretty early, feeling some disappointment with elements that had absolutely nothing to do with the masterful story, Koryta's gorgeous writing, and the book as it is.

Because the book itself is fantastic. With the flavoring of old movies like Key Largo and fascinating, flawed characters, along with a twisting story that repeatedly surprised me, I had a hard time putting the book down at all once I reached the halfway point. I couldn't sit down with it and not read 70-80 pages at a stretch, even when time wasn't exactly something I had to spare. I loved the nuance of the supernatural element and how carefully Koryta built it into the story, as well, and I'm already anxious to pick up one of the other works he's written in this vein.

I don't think this ranks higher for me among his novels than the more recent ones I've read, but I did adore it. If you're a fan of suspense and historical fiction both, you'll absolutely want to pick this one up (even if you normally don't read the supernatural, I'd say). show less

A chance selection, which was sadly more 'sink' than 'swim' for me. (Note to self: never trust author recommendations from Stephen King.) The plot was sound enough but the pacing was more of a leaking tap than a burst dam, to borrow imagery from the story, and I didn't care about the characters either.

I'm fascinated by drowned towns, and the setting for the story seems to be the reservoirs of the Catskills Aqueduct in New York, but I was left puzzled by the ghosts of this fictional show more underwater community. Was the land supposed to be cursed, like the clichéd Indian burial ground? Why were the inhabitants so obsessed with defending the place, which was flooded around the time of the Second World War, and then returning from the dead to get revenge? Who was the photographer? I liked the twist of connecting the soggy spirits to living descendants but never really understood the loyalty, or why Gillian's grandmother was trying to brainwash her young granddaughter into sharing her watery fate. If the place was such a historic landmark, wouldn't Halesburg have been protected?

The ending was a bit of a damp squib too. I was expecting a big supernatural showdown but the dam breaks, floods the nearest towns, and then - nothing. I mean, people died, sure, but that's more of an environmental disaster than a ghost story.

Very instructive - I learned a lot about dams and reservoirs - and well written, but the author could have done with flooding the story with more than a steady stream. show less

Never Far Away' was an entertaining read that kept surprising me but sometimes in a way that left me a little frustrated at the path chosen.

The thing I enjoyed most about the book was that the two main characters were slightly off-centre. They were believable but unpredictable. The only thing they had in common was that they were both dangerous.

Firstly, there's Nina Morgan, now known as Leah Trenton. She's not the normal surprisingly-competent-mom-in-peril that thriller writers love. She is show more competent: a qualified Maine Guide at home in the wilderness, a licensed pilot and a good shot, but she's mainly a woman so deeply enmeshed in lies that she no longer knows how to tell the truth. She's been living a lie for a decade since she faked her own death and abandoned her infant children. When circumstances forced her to re-enter their lives, she continued to lie to her children, introducing herself as their dead mother's sister and then whisking them off to a new life. Her lies put the children and her partner, who's only known her as Leah Trenton, in danger but she still can't bring herself to tell the truth. The impact of this fundamental dishonesty drove a lot of the action of the book and created an ambiguous moral tone that I enjoyed.

Then there's Dax Blackwell, the ultra-competent, cool-in-a-crisis hitman. At first, I thought he'd be the contract-killer-with-a-moral-code who would risk everything to save the mom-in-peril and her adorable, brave and innocent children. After all, there are a few versions of that character in top selling Thriller series. I was delighted to find that Blackwell was more complicated than that. He does have a professional code for doing business, one that he learnt at his father's knee, but it doesn't involve rescuing people or putting himself at risk for no reward. He's someone who tries hard to be a rational man who takes decisions without being swayed by emotions. I liked that, although his actions almost always seemed rational to Blackman, they often came as a surprise to me. It took me a long time to work out that Blackman really wasn't on anybody's side but his own. This meant that I could never be sure who he would help and who he would hurt but I knew that, whenever he was involved, someone would die.

These two wildcards interact with well-drawn versions of people you'd hope to meet in any good thriller: an evil billionaire and his two hard-hearted assassins, a bright, brave but distrustful and unhappy teenage daughter determined to protect her cute but useless little brother, a boy-next-door-with-a-crush who is in danger of being collateral damage, Nina/Leah's almost-too-nice-to-be-true young partner and his loyal dog.

I had fun with this novel but, in the end, I found Blackman's unpredictability a little unsatisfying. I believed in the outcomes but I wasn't swept along by them.

To me, it felt as if the novel moved quite slowly at the start but that might be because I started with the audiobook version of 'Never Far Away' and ended up returning it by the end of Chapter 5 because the narrator, Robert Petkoff, kept emoting all over Michael Koryta's prose, seemingly trying to squeeze some melodrama out of a story that didn't need it.

Once moved to the ebook version, I was more comfortable and could appreciate the hard-edged dispassion with which the violence and death that peppers the book were described.

The final big confrontation scene of the book had me on the edge of my seat. I had no idea how it was going to go and who, if anybody, would survive. Even so, when the cards were shown and the survivors were known, I found the ending a little abrupt. I think Michael Koryta wanted to end on an adrenalin high rather than get bogged down in a here's-what-happened-to-eveyone-aftwards chapter. Maybe he was right but it surprised me. show less