Michael Koryta: Those Who Wish Me Dead

Michael Koryta’s Those Who Wish Me Dead is a textbook example of a thriller that opens strong and ends with a yawn. It is a highly competent, but entirely by-the-numbers survival story that writes a massive check promise in its opening chapters, only for the rest of the narrative to squander it.

The initial premise sets the stage for an engaging strong-arm mafioso game, then pivots to a gritty wilderness cat-and-mouse game. The tension is palpable early on. But once the board is fully set, the pacing stalls.

The primary antagonists, the Blackwell brothers, are the most glaring example of this. They are written to be an awkward yet unstoppable, terrifying force of nature, but they read exactly like store-brand Salamanca twins from Breaking Bad. They lack actual depth, or any kind of character backstory minus a few paragraphs at the end in the epilogue. While the protagonist and supporting cast remain likable enough to keep the pages turning, the threat pursuing them feels entirely manufactured by the writer, not organic.

The real failure of the novel lies in its basic logistical mechanics. The villains' grand scheme is so convoluted that the tension evaporates under the slightest scrutiny. At a certain point, the reader is left staring at the page, wondering why the antagonists didn't just do a drive by and he doesn't with it. Why the complex scheme is necessary is soly because we wouldn't have a story.

The plot is boy (Jace) witnesses murder, from far away, has no actual details to explain to the cops, escapes the persuers, and is then shipped off to witness protection. Not in the system, but around it. Jamie, a hradnosed detective remembers a survival instructor (Ethan) she had a while back and sends the boy there to safe keeping.

The brothers track him down, murder some locals, start a forest fire, and put Ethan's wife Allison in the hospital.

Spoilers: it's revealed that Jace's mom, Jamie whom hired Ethan, actually is not his mom but sister to the killers. Jamie’s rationale for the entire operation is baffling. She intentionally selects Ethan, a highly competent outdoorsman, for her scheme because she needs "believability" to sell a cover story. If you are engineering a complex criminal conspiracy, you are inherently a liar. The logical move is to hire a terrible guide, let him predictably fail in the wilderness, and then simply lie about the circumstances. By intentionally choosing a capable adversary just to make her lie look better, the plot forces the characters to behave like idiots to keep the story moving.

The twist of protective Jamie not being jace's mom, while it caught me off guard in the moment, a brief retrospective proves it was telegraphed. It's one of those twists added just to add a twist to a story.

The real issue is that once the twist drops, the narrative completely derails. The story drags on for significantly longer than the premise can support. A ruthless editor could have easily taken a machete to the middle act, trimmed fifty pages of wandering through the brush, and lost absolutely nothing of value.

Worse still, Koryta fails to pay off his own inciting incident. The mystery established in the original premise, "who was the man in the water?" is essentially abandoned. Instead of a satisfying resolution, the reader is handed vague insinuations as the author brings us home to close up shop.

Ultimately, Those Who Wish Me Dead is a passable, cookie-cutter mainstream read. If you need a fast-paced paperback to kill a few hours, this will scratch the itch. But if you are looking for a visceral, thought-provoking dive into the survival thriller genre, this blueprint is far too flawed and surface level.