Sorrow's Anthem
Lincoln Perry • Book 2
by Michael Koryta
Why You'll Love This
When your childhood best friend dies a suspect, the hardest investigation isn't finding the truth — it's living with what it costs you.
- Great if you want: a PI mystery driven by loyalty, grief, and old neighborhood secrets
- The experience: steadily tightening — Cleveland feels lived-in and the stakes personal
- The writing: Koryta grounds hard-boiled pacing in genuine emotional weight, not just plot mechanics
- Skip if: you want a standalone — character history from book one adds depth
About This Book
When a childhood friend dies in a police confrontation—wanted for arson and murder—Lincoln Perry can't simply grieve and move on. Ed Gradduk may have made bad choices, but Lincoln refuses to believe he's a killer, and that refusal pulls him into a Cleveland underworld where old fires are still burning. What makes this story compelling isn't the mystery itself but the emotional weight underneath it: a man reckoning with loyalty, guilt, and the distance that quietly grows between people who once knew each other completely. The stakes feel personal in a way that purely plot-driven crime fiction rarely achieves.
Koryta writes Cleveland with the specificity of someone who genuinely loves a complicated city, and that groundedness gives the novel a texture most thrillers lack. The pacing is deliberate without being slow—he trusts readers to sit with Lincoln's doubt and moral discomfort rather than rushing toward resolution. As the second Lincoln Perry novel, it deepens the partnership between Lincoln and Joe Pritchard in ways that feel earned rather than obligatory. Koryta's prose is clean and unshowy, and that restraint is exactly the right choice for a story this emotionally tangled.