To The Last Page

If you’ve been reading John Connolly’s Charlie Parker series you’ll have noticed a pattern forming around the different forms of evil that the private investigator has had to deal with over the course of the last sixteen books. With A Book of Bones , the seventeenth book in an exceptional and consistently brilliant series, events finally seem to be moving towards and coalescing around an apocalyptic conclusion, and it looks like everything is in place to bring about the total destruction of the world. So far you would have to say that Parker has always come out on top in his various encounters with evil entities, but it’s often been at a great personal cost and there have been serious consequences for Parker’s friends and family. There’s always remains a sense of unfinished business along the way however, and some of that carries over from the previous Charlie Parker book The Woman in the Woods into A Book of Bones . On his way to testify at a trial in Houston, Texas, Parker is divert...

The writing is as elegant in its creation of mood, and that mood remains quite sinister in John Connolly's 15th Charlie Parker thriller, but it does initially feel like not much has progressed this time in A Game of Ghosts . There certainly don't seem to be any great leaps towards a final endgame that seemed to be drawing closer in some of the previous books and the changes that do occur here seem to be more subtle and personal than apocalyptic in nature, but they could prove to be significant in the long run, or indeed in the near future. The immediately preceding books established a significant change in the world that Connolly's PI Charlie Parker is operating in. It's one where the boundaries between supernatural evil entities and the real world are now a little more fluid. Evil is at large in the world, its presence becoming more pervasive, with the traffic running both ways and blurring the usual strict demarcations. The escalating horrors are starting to suggest s...

For an author whose crime fiction involves the supernatural to a large degree, John Connolly does a very disturbing line in exploring real world horrors in his Charlie Parker series. Each Charlie Parker novel contributes to build up a darker picture of sinister forces of evil at large in the world and becoming increasing influential, but the question of whether the atrocities are committed to serve these supernatural agencies or whether it is a build-up of human evil that creates such forces is a distinction that is less clear. What is shocking however is that no matter how horrific the crimes of some of Parker's dark adversaries are, they all lie within the capacity of humans to inflict upon others. It would seem that there is no limit to the amount of suffering, torment and death that some are capable of inflicting on on other human beings. A Time of Torment  is the author's 14th Charlie Parker case, while it largely sees the investigator involved on a self-contained investig...

Charlie Parker comes across all kinds of horrors in his work as a Private Detective, particularly for one who is sensitive to or who tends to attract things of a somewhat supernatural character. The horror that comes up in A Song of Shadows however is one that is rather disturbingly entirely man-made - or, depending on your view of evil, perhaps not - extending to those involved in the running of the Nazi death camps during WWII and their victims. Parker got a bit too close to the after-life in his last case, and at the start of A Song of Shadows he's in recovery in the small coastal town of Boreas in Maine. Lucky to be alive at all, he's making his first tentative, painful steps to recovery, but - needless to say - it's not too long before trouble turns up on his doorstep, and of course it's never anything minor either. A dead body washed up on the beach, a burnt house with a family murdered and their son missing, a young neighbouring girl who has unsettling dreams. ...