We found a new author you may want to pick up while you're waiting for a new book from Greg Iles, John Hart or James Lee Burke ... even Stephen King. He's Michael Koryta, and his new novel, The Cypress House, may break him out to a much wider audience.
The Cypress House reminded us a bit too of Tim Gautreaux's The Missing, which was also about a veteran of World War I who returns home, tries to live a quiet life, only to find himself caught up in backwoods corruption. It had the added similarity of hooking our interest from page one.
Here it's the 1930s, and Arlen Wagner, years out of the war and still searching for his place in society, is riding the train to Key West with his young protege, Paul Brickell, an Alabama teenager with a particular genius for engineering. The two are hoping to get construction work on the bridge at Key West when Arlen is visited by a rare premonition. He is able to recognize people who are on the verge of sudden death. The bad thing about this particular vision is that everyone on board the train is doomed.
Arlen and Paul get off at the next stop, a backwater Florida community, and in a span of two days, they find themselves in slighly less trouble than if they had stayed on the train. Their host is murdered, they are jailed and beaten as suspects, all as a monster hurricane bares down on them. And this is just the beginning.
Koryta is good at developing his characters, especially the troubled hero, whose powers of premonition are kept in check, just in case you're short on suspension of disbelief. We expect this will prove to be a stand-out thriller for 2011.
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