Onyx reviews: Never Far Away by Michael Koryta

Reviewed by Bev Vincent, 1/16/2021

Good people can do bad things, and vice versa. Nina Morgan's life was in jeopardy a decade ago because her job as a pilot for a company described as "Blackwater on steroids" put her in the middle of some very bad people. When she decides to testify against the son of the company's incredibly powerful owner, Corson Lowery, she's visited by a pair of hired assassins. However, she's able to turn that situation around (in the book's gripping prolog) because these killers have issues with the man who hired them. Nina concocts her own version of witness protection and disappears from her life, leaving behind her husband and two children, ages three and one. It's the only way she can protect them: if she's presumed dead, the wealthy businessman will have no reason to go after her family.

Ten years later, she's living as Leah Trenton in remote western Maine, partnered with a hunting guide who knows nothing about her past. She gets a message on a satellite pager from her daughter, Hailey. She subsequently learns that her husband Doug was killed in a car accident. Doug had trained his children to reach out to "Aunt Leah" if anything happened to him. The children were too young when she left to remember their mother, and for their safety she has to keep up the pretext. She uproots them from the only home they've ever known, taking them back to Maine where she sets up a new home in Portland.

Without the evidence of a body, Lowrey has long had his doubts that Nina is really dead. When he hears about Doug's accident, he liberates a pair of assassins from the private prison he owns, sending them to find out who will appear to look after the children. In parallel, Leah phones the one person who knows the truth about her supposed death, seeking advice. That call leads to Dax Blackwell, introduced in If She Wakes. He's the nephew and son of the two sociopaths who helped Nina fake her death. (These homicidal brothers met their fates in Those Who Wish Me Dead.) Despite his youthful appearance, he is a killer like his kin and extremely resourceful. He sees Leah's predicament as an opportunity to settle an old score, so he starts following the trail that will lead him ultimately to her new life.

Suddenly becoming a mother to internet-savvy teenagers is a difficult transition for Leah. Hailey and her younger brother Nick resent being uprooted by this woman they only know by name, and Maine is a far cry from the comfortable life they had with their father. When people start turning up dead, including Leah's attorney, she knows her cover has been blown. She takes the kids into the deep woods to await the arrival of the assassins. Little does she know that she has an unlikely and highly mercurial potential ally in Blackwell, whose allegiances shift with the wind.

Forces converge in a beautiful but remote corner of a beautiful but remote state, where a deadly confrontation full of vividly described and creatively imagined action plays out, with plenty of twists to keep even the most avid thriller fan guessing how things are going to end. Even when they're trying to kill each other, there is a mutual respect among the three men for whom murder is a way of life.

Over the course of the novel, Koryta references numerous fellow authors, including Cormac McCarthy, Neil Gaiman, Joe Hill, Chuck Wendig, Paul Tremblay, Dean Koontz, Stephen King, Alafair Burke and Michael Connelly, along with a cameo reference to one Scott Carson, the pen name Koryta used for The Chill.