That you should read The Cypress House!
"With last year's So Cold The River, 20-something Michael Koryta veered from the familiar P.I. genre (his Lincoln Perry series) and started knocking on the door of the creepy-crime school run by Stephen King, Dean Koontz and John Connolly. In The Cypress House (Little, Brown, 432 pages, $28), he's graduated cum laude.
A ramshackle roadhouse in the stormy, Depression-era Florida Keys lends a suitably eerie backdrop to this gothic-noir tale of revenge, romance and reconciliation as itinerant First World War vet Arlen Wagner stumbles across a nest of corruption, dope-running and murder. That Wagner also senses when folks are not long for this world just spooks things up a tad without crimping the western-inspired shoot-'em-up finale.
Koryta manages to bust a host of genres while uniting them all through clever plotting, deft character portrayals and cut-with-a-knife atmosphere. He's way too young to do that."
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