Envy the Night
From AwardAnnals
| Book: | Envy the Night |
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| Author: | Michael Koryta |
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| Publisher: | St. Martin's Minotaur |
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.
Family secrets, mob hitmen, and a father’s shadowy legacy combine to make this Koryta’s most compelling thriller yet.
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“Koryta is one of the best of the best, plain and simple.” —Michael Connelly
“Superb writing and storytelling from Michael Koryta, one of crime fiction’s brightest young talents. Envy the Night represents his finest work to date." —George Pelecanos
“Addictively readable.” —Chicago Tribune
“Sentence for polished sentence, no one in the genre writes better.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Stylish prose…well observed.” —The New York Times
“Haunting writing…sophisticated plotting.” —Publishers Weekly
“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.” —Laura Lippman
“For a while now Michael Koryta has been called one of the rising young talents in crime fiction. I say enough of that….Koryta is one of the best of the best, plain and simple.” —Michael Connelly
Reviews
Amazon.com
Reading James Crumley and John D. MacDonald set the writing hook in me: I wanted to write mysteries and thrillers. I wanted to be a storyteller.
Now, in Michael Koryta, all these years later, I’ve read the heir apparent to those masters. There is grit and determination in Michael’s writing; there is heart and character; the threat of violence first simmers, then boils over. The pulse quickens. Envy The Night is everything this kind of novel is meant to be. A more fitting title: Envy The Writer.
It has been a long time since I’ve enjoyed a mystery novel as much as Envy The Night. This book had me from the first page, and much to my surprise, kept me reading hard and fast until the last.
What separates this book from others? One word: characters. Stories are stories. We all read (and write) a ton of them. But we come to novels to meet fresh faces, and Michael Koryta delivers.
This diabolical mystery novel, laid out in simple but eloquent prose and pitch-perfect dialogue, heralds a changing of the guard. I have seen the future of “The Best Mystery Writer in America” and its name is Michael Koryta. —Ridley Pearson
Barnes and Noble
You can’t always tell a book by its cover blurbs, but the ones decorating Michael Koryta’s Envy the Night have the crystal ring of truth and admiration. Michael Connelly and George Pelicanos are not often generous to a fault, but Koryta’s first stand-alone thriller—after three books in his excellent series about Indiana private eye Lincoln Perry—might make you rush out to obtain it and lock yourself in your room until you finish it.
Koryta’s Lincoln Perry books were wonderful slices of midwestern noir (A Welcome Grave was an Edgar finalist). But Envy the Night is that rarest of literary creatures: a stand-alone thriller that we want to be a series. Could it happen? Could Frank Temple III, the 24-year-old son of a hired killer, and Nora Stafford, at 30 the unwilling proprietor of her comatose father’s auto body shop, survive all the dangers they face in the bucolic Wisconsin lakefront town known as Willow Flowage, just down the road from Tomahawk? We live in hope.
“Frank had endured a lot of pity over the years, some genuine, some false,” Koryta tells us. “Sometimes it would be expressed directly to him; other times it just showed in their eyes. Poor kid. Imagine having such a monster for a father. The problem, though, the one that Frank saw and nobody else ever could, was that he’d been a good father…”
Nora is another beautifully drawn character, a basically sad young woman forced home by family devotion and now as lonely and displaced as Frank. They bond to stay alive, although even that part of their relationship is frequently tested. Other characters—an auto body worker from hell who turns out to be some kind of hero, an enigmatic FBI agent who keeps an eye on Frank for guilty reasons of his own, and a motley crew of inept and very ept villains—are also brought to life with lots of art but very few words. —Dick Adler
