Works by
Michael Koryta
(Writer)

Fiction

Lincoln Perry Series

1. Tonight I Said Goodbye (2004) -- Winner annual SMP/PWA Prize for Best First PI Novel; Nominated  Edgar award for the Best First Novel
   When investigator Wayne Weston is found dead of an apparent suicide in his home in an upscale Cleveland suburb, his wife and five-year-old daughter missing, Lincoln Perry and his partner Joe Pritchard are hired by Weston's father to bring some resolution to the high-profile case. The investigators quickly discover there is much more to the situation than has been described in the prevalent media reports: rumors of gambling debts and extortion, a millionaire real estate tycoon, and a group of Russians with ties to organized crime who don't appreciate being investigated—a point they make clear with baseball bats.
   
   Just when the investigators feel they are closing in on a possible source of answers, another murder forces them to change directions in the case. Perry travels to a resort town in South Carolina to follow a lead involving a very dangerous ex-Marine. There he finds more than one game is being played, and all of them are deadly. The stakes quickly become personal for Perry, and it's clear that there will be no walking away from this case.

2. Sorrow's Anthem (2006)
   In the beginning, it was just about the money. Then things got personal.This is the story that Ed Gradduk tells his private investigator Lincoln Perry when the two are reunited for the first time in years. They were close once, best friends who roamed the same streets and shared the same laughter and pain until the day when Perry made a decision that brought an abrupt end to the friendship. Now Ed is on the run, hiding from the police who are looking to arrest him for arson and murder. When Perry succeeds in catching up with Gradduk in one of their old neighborhood haunts, he finds him full of drunken memories and muddled thoughts.
   
   Then Gradduk is killed in a brutal confrontation with the Cleveland police, and Perry can't walk away from the situation until he understands the forces that brought his old friend down. With the grudging assistance of his partner, Joe Pritchard, Perry begins an investigation that takes him from blue-collar bars to the offices of city officials. Perry and Pritchard soon realize that whatever Gradduk became involved with went well beyond a personal grudge. Also clear is that someone wants to see that the secrets Gradduk came close to uncovering stay buried—at any cost.

3. A Welcome Grave (2007)
   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....
   
   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 fiancee.
   
   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 there's 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.

4. The Silent Hour (August 2009 Release)
   Whisper Ridge—Home to Dreams—November 6, 1992-April 27, 1996
   
   So reads the strange epitaph carved beside the door of the home called Whisper Ridge, a multimillion-dollar piece of architectural majesty that once housed the beginnings of a unique program for paroled murderers. It was the passion of Alexandra Sanabria, the daughter of a deceased Mafia don, but the program never got off the ground. Uninhabited for twelve years, the home now remains as a strange monument to dangerous secrets.
   
   Private investigator Lincoln Perry's first involvement with the house and its legacy comes when Parker Harrison—a convicted killer and former tenant of Whisper Ridge—asks him to find Alexandra, who disappeared with her husband after the failure of the program. Disconcerted and embarrassed by his own immediate mistrust of Harrison, Perry decides to take the request at face value until he discovers that the bones of the Alexandra's husband were discovered at the exact same time Harrison began his quest to locate her.
   
   Now the investigation is active again and decade-old threats are circling, confronting Perry with a sordid family mystery that will challenge both his abilities as a detective and his commitment to that calling.

Stand-Alone Fiction

• Envy the Night -- Winner Los Angeles Times Book Prize for the year's best mystery/thriller; Nominee Barry Award for Best Novel
  In this first stand-alone novel from the critically acclaimed Edgar Award-finalist, Michael Koryta fulfills his early promise with a dark and mature novel of a young man trying to escape his past.
  
  It has been seven years since Frank Temple III joined the rest of the world in learning his father's bloody secret: The U.S. marshal maintained a covert career as a contract killer, a double-life that ended in suicide to avoid prosecution and prison.
  
  The shocking revelation triggered years of anonymous drifting for Frank, time spent running from his legacy and struggling to believe that the father he'd loved so dearly was entirely in the wrong. After all, the victims hadn't been innocents. And Devin Matteson, the man who'd lured his father into the killing game only to later give him up to the FBI, is probably the darkest of the lot. Those are troubling thoughts, and Frank tries to stay away from them. But when an old family friend calls to say that Matteson is returning to the isolated Wisconsin lake that was once sacred ground for their families, it's a homecoming Frank knows he can't allow.
  
  His arrival in town reveals a situation far from the expected, though.
  
  While Matteson is nowhere to be found, his old cabin is indeed occupied—by a strange, beautiful woman and a nervous man with a gun. When a pair of assassins from Miami arrive on their heels, Frank knows Matteson can't be far behind. And while the wise move would be to call in the police and get out of town fast, that just doesn't feel right. After all, contract killer or not, Frank's father was at heart a teacher. And his son excelled at the lessons.