A Welcome Grave

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....
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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