Every Dead Thing - Charlie Parker, Bk 1 Author:John Connolly Former NYPD detective Charlie "Bird" Parker is on the verge of madness. Tortured by the unsolved slayings of his wife and young daughter, he is a man consumed by guilt, regret, and the desire for revenge. — When his former partner asks him to track down a missing girl, Parker finds himself drawn into a world beyond his imagining: a worl... more »d where thirty-year-old killings remain shrouded in fear and lies, a world where the ghosts of the dead torment the living, a world haunted by the murderer responsible for the deaths in his family -- a serial killer who uses the human body to create works of art and takes faces as his prize.
But the search awakens buried instincts in Parker: instincts for survival, for compassion, for love, and, ultimately, for killing. Aided by a beautiful young psychologist and a pair of bickering career criminals, Parker becomes the bait in a trap set in the humid bayous of Louisiana, a trap that threatens the lives of everyone in its reach. Driven by visions of the dead and the voice of an old black psychic who met a terrible end, Parker must seek a final, brutal confrontation with a murderer who has moved beyond all notions of humanity, who has set out to create a hell on earth: the serial killer known only as the Traveling Man.« less
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I purchased and read Connolly's The Book of Lost Things first, and though I had rather high expectations for his debut novel, despite the difference in genre, I was not at all disappointed. While the mystery was not impossible to figure out, the tension and suspense remained throughout the novel, so that I was curious to see how it all played out.
The book (obviously) was vastly different, but still highly enjoyable. The writing was strong, and the book was utterly absorbing, nearly impossible to put down. I can't believe how quickly Connolly has jumped into being one of my favorite authors, and definitely my best discovery of 2008. All in all, I loved reading this book.
This author is not for me, when you get to 100 pages and it is still just getting started and you are bored with all the description, etc. then it is time to move on.
I enjoyed this book from the start. It is a bit wordy, but you can really see every thing from the author's point of view. I did not figure out who the killer was till the end, I was very suprised. This story made me want to visit New Orleans.
Devora C. reviewed Every Dead Thing (Charlie Parker, Bk 1) on
John Connolly superbly taps into the tortured mind and gritty world of former NYPD dective Charlie "Bird" Parker, tormented by the brutal, unsolved murders of his wife and young daughter. Driven by visions of the dead, Parker tracks a serial killer from New York City to the American South, and finds his buried instincts - for love, survival, and, ultimately, for killing - awakening as he confronts a monster beyond imagining...
An entertaining read that goes a little overboard in the unnecessarily graphic department, but that makes up for it with complex, interesting and unpredictable characters populating a gruesome story well told. Connolly's narrative voice is compelling and entertaining, and in some of his finer moments, he captures an almost lyrical beauty in the heinous nature of both the crimes committed and in Parker's visceral responses to those crimes.
Beyond that, Connolly does a nice tapdance in negotiating the white between hard-nosed cop/crime and mood-based horror. He's just ambiguous enough with his language and descriptions to keep the reader guessing how much of what he experiences is perception and how much is touch-that real, and while that was a bit frustrating for me in "Every Dead Thing," it did drive me to pick up the second book in the series, which reads to the kind of payoff I was hoping to find.
Haunting, emotional, visceral and gritty, "Every Dead Thing" succeeds where very few do, bridging two very different and well-defined genres by being true to each of them in their own right rather than mitigating one in favor of the other. If Stephen King and Robert Parker had a lovechild, I'm pretty sure he'd write a lot like John Connolly, and that's a good thing ... a very, very good thing indeed.
This murder mystery has a former NYPD detective "on the verge of madness" because of the horrific death of his wife and daughter. He helps hgis foirmer partner find a missing girl and unravels a series of terrifying situations to come to grips with his own life. A great read.
One serial killer who tortures children and another who steals victims' faces after mutilating their bodies give readers two grisly plots in one darkly ingenious debut novel. New York Homicide cop Charlie "Bird" Parker left the force when his wife and baby daughter were gruesomely murdered (while he was boozing down the block), but he agrees to trace a missing woman as a favor to his old partner. The trail leads from Brooklyn wise guys to a dying rural Virginia town where the shameful secret (children were tortured and killed by wealthy local eccentrics) is linked to the missing woman. Stepping on toes and muscling past stonewallers, Charlie eludes hired killers to flush several villains into the open with the help of two friendly hitmen. a competently lethal gay couple
This is the first book in Connolly's Charlie Parker series. I have read one other book in the series, The Unquiet, which I thought was a very superior thriller. In Every Dead Thing, Parker's wife and daughter are killed in a very brutal manner while Parker was out getting wasted at the local tavern. Parker was a detective in the NYPD when this happened but the murders turn Parker away from the police and he then works on his own as an unlicensed investigator. As such, he gets involved in a series of child killings which are somehow tied indirectly to the mob in New York. To solve this case, he goes to a small town in Virginia to track a missing young woman and gets into the path of some very vile serial killers who have been killing children for years. Parker is able to solve this case but then he moves on to try to find the killer of his wife and daughter who is known as the "Traveling Man." This leads Parker to the bayous of Louisiana and some more very violent and disturbing killings. But who is the killer and why has he targeted Parker?
This novel was very intense and kept me guessing right up to near the end. The novel was actually two stories in one with the earlier child killings and Parker's later pursuit of the Traveling Man. I was pretty much engrossed with the story although I did think it could have been shortened or maybe even done as two separate novels. Anyway, I will be reading more of the series - hopefully in order.
