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Books : Fiction : Authors, A-Z : C : Connolly, John
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John Connolly's harrowing Charlie Parker adventures continue in The White Road, a bleak modern gothic tale detailing the tortured detective's metaphorical journey into the unthought of depths of the underworld as he follows a trail of horrors in America's deep South. Doggedly loyal to old friends and stubbornly supportive of lost causes, Parker encounters his own ghosts in a place where atmosphere alone would murder hope. The chilling preacher Faulkner is again a dark presence in the background while Parker's friends, Angel and Louis, damaged and deadly, follow their own avenging trail. There can be no greater compliment to Connolly's powers of description than to say that no US writer could improve on the Irish journalist's masterly summoning of the roots of American regional evil and sense of place. Superb storytelling that binds diverse and hypnotic strands of plot with Biblical overtones and fury. The villains are larger than life and diabolically unforgettable: from the strange and menacing Mr Kittim to deformed killer Cyrus Nairn, both of whom lead Parker down one shadowy road after another. Compelling adventures from start to finish, if the very stuff of waking nightmares. The dark side has never proven so damn seductive. --Maxim Jakubowski
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Homicide cop Charlie "Bird" Parker was drunk when the killer known as the Travelling Man dissected his wife and his daughter. Parker's guilt and obsession with revenge have taken him well beyond the law, causing him to beat a pimp to death and accept the friendship of a notable hitman. Yet his old colleagues know that any one of them might have gone down the same path, in the same circumstances, and they and FBI man Woolrich still find him and his obsessions useful. Leaving mayhem and destruction in his wake, Parker finds every private investigation he takes leading him back to his family's killer--is this an obsession, or is he treading a maze of murder built just for him? And can the obsessed Parker accept the love of a bright woman pathologist without wrecking her life as well? Small Virginia towns with guilty secrets, the drugs deals that unite smart New York society with the madness of a decadent Mafia dynasty, the very different gang wars of New Orleans and the mysteries of the Louisiana swampland--this is an intelligent book packed with puzzles, characters and brilliantly visualised locations that most thriller-writers would have spun out for a series. --Roz Kaveney
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Spider-bites are a nasty way to die, and there is a man out there with an unusual taste for insect venom of all kinds and for the deaths of those who disagree with or affront him. John Connolly's sleuth Charlie Parker is free of the ghosts of his slaughtered wife and child, but sooner or later new ghosts come to him demanding silently that he avenge them. In The Killing Kind, it is not Grace, the ex-girlfriend whose faked suicide he is hired to investigate, so much as the dead fanatics she was killed for writing a thesis on. The Aroostook Baptists disappeared into the gloomy woods of North Maine in the sixties and nothing more is known until road workers find a mass burial. Connolly provides his usual excellent combination of snappy one-liners (many of them from Parker's gay assassin sidekicks Angel and Louis) together with scenes of the utmost terror. Parker soon realises that the spider killer, Elmer Pudd, is only the tool of someone far worse, a sanctimonious artist in intolerance and mayhem--and it is only by carefully measured doses that we come to realise just how bad that is going to be. --Roz Kaveney
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With The Black Angel, John Connolly takes his Charlie Parker series a step further away from the conventional serial killer thriller and over the border into supernatural horror--which, in fairness, is where these extraordinary books have been heading from the beginning. The question of why and how so many bad people find their way into Parker's orbit has always been lurking in the background of his novels; why so many ghosts of victims point him the way to vengeful justice and why so good a man is so fond of his killer for hire friends Louis and Angel. Many writers would just leave these as givens, but Connolly has too much integrity for that.The search for Louis' junkie whore cousin, and her abductors, leads the trio ever further into darkness. They have fought evil obsessives before, but none as bad as the Believers, a group obsessed with fallen angels and with the strange sculpted objects men have made from human bones. This time at least there is a possibility that what the Believers believe is true, both what they believe about the world and what they believe about Parker--this is a book which ought to be insane and ludicrous and is in fact chilling. --Roz Kaveney
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John Connolly writes dark, streetwise thrillers that pull no punches when showing human cruelty. Bad Men blends noir crime with supernatural horror as murderous gangsters invade an island whose ghosts have a special way with bad men.Dutch Island, once known as Sanctuary, lies off the coast of Connolly's regular stamping-ground, the US state of Maine. A gory prologue relates dreadful doings there in 1693. Now it's a sleepy, only slightly spooky haven, easily policed by a single cop--the literally giant-sized "Melancholy Joe" Dupree--plus a mainland deputy.
Joe knows something of Sanctuary's history and the forces that seem to cleanse it of toxic human elements. Following two deaths in a tragic car crash, the old ghosts seem restless, as though waiting for something. They're waiting for a man called Moloch.
Moloch, amoral and appalling, is doing time as a major criminal organiser. His beautiful, cruelly treated wife Marian took her chance to cut loose before Moloch killed her, betraying him to the police and escaping to Dutch Island with their son, a brand-new identity and a small fortune in cash.
When Moloch's team of picked killers seizes a long-awaited opportunity to free him, reunion with his wife is the next priority. Working their way through her friends, relatives and contacts, they leave a chilling trail of death and mutilation. The emotionless assassin Shepherd is bad enough, but irascible Tell has a hair-trigger temper and kills unnecessarily (eg: a bystander talking too loudly on his mobile phone), while the eerily beautiful young man Willard does it lingeringly and for fun. Even Moloch, who coldly and effortlessly dominates this awful crew, is unnerved by Willard.
When all these (and more) reach Sanctuary, a freak snowstorm rages, power and communications fail, and unknowing locals standing between the hitmen and Marian are easy meat. Two quick bullets should deal with Joe Dupree and his current deputy, a female rookie cop from Portland. But something else, as we know from many portents and Moloch's own dreams, is waiting.
Bad Men is a standalone novel despite the brief, superfluous appearance of Connolly's regular PI character Charles Parker. It's a suspenseful, compelling read, hypnotic in its orchestration of brutality and mayhem; readers are likely to wince frequently and even involuntarily shut their eyes. --David Langford
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John Connolly's harrowing Charlie Parker adventures continue in The White Road, a bleak modern gothic tale detailing the tortured detective's metaphorical journey into the unthought of depths of the underworld as he follows a trail of horrors in America's deep South. Doggedly loyal to old friends and stubbornly supportive of lost causes, Parker encounters his own ghosts in a place where atmosphere alone would murder hope. The chilling preacher Faulkner is again a dark presence in the background while Parker's friends, Angel and Louis, damaged and deadly, follow their own avenging trail. There can be no greater compliment to Connolly's powers of description than to say that no US writer could improve on the Irish journalist's masterly summoning of the roots of American regional evil and sense of place. Superb storytelling that binds diverse and hypnotic strands of plot with Biblical overtones and fury. The villains are larger than life and diabolically unforgettable: from the strange and menacing Mr Kittim to deformed killer Cyrus Nairn, both of whom lead Parker down one shadowy road after another. Compelling adventures from start to finish, if the very stuff of waking nightmares. The dark side has never proven so damn seductive. --Maxim Jakubowski