Night Tremors

Rick Cahill is not a man at peace. Guilt over a killing he can't forget, grief over a wife he couldn't save, and days spent trailing cheating spouses through parking lots — this is the life he's built, and he knows it's not enough. When a chance arrives to do something that actually matters — to possibly free an innocent man from prison — Rick takes it, even knowing the powerful people who want that case buried. What follows pulls him from La Jolla's sun-drenched wealth into San Diego's harder shadows, where every answer seems to cost him something he can't afford to lose.

Coyle writes with the kind of controlled restraint that makes the emotional weight hit harder, not softer. Rick Cahill is a damaged protagonist drawn with real psychological texture — his self-recrimination never tips into self-pity, and his decency feels earned rather than assumed. The plotting is clean and propulsive, the San Diego setting atmospheric without being a postcard, and the moral stakes stay personal throughout. This is crime fiction that trusts its readers to sit with discomfort.