This is the twenty-third in a series that began in 1999, with Every Dead Thing and here, our man investigates the apparent drowning of a troubled teenager, Scott Thierault, who had absconded from an institution set up to provide ‘hard love’. His father, a career criminal serving a jail term, hires Parker out of a mix of deep parental guilt, and a sense that something is ‘just not right’. In an apparently unconnected thread we meet three men who call themselves ‘The Game’. They were once a quartet, but that is another story. Kenney, Teal and The Saint are sexually sadistic serial killers. They target prostitutes, vulnerable addicts and other women who are on ‘the wrong side of society’. Their kills are planned with military precision, forensic awareness, and scrupulous attention to local CCTV capability.

We don’t have to wait long before learning the link between the players of The Game and Parker’s new case. When he does his preliminary research into the death of Scott Theriault Parker discovers that another Maine teenager, Mallory Norton, went missing at about the same time.

Meanwhile, in a Detroit bar, Teal and Kenney are wondering if their partner The Saint has gone rogue, and may be responsible for whatever has happened to Mallory Norton. We learn about The Spero, the institution from which Scott Theriault absconded. The building itself seems to be cursed. It had been built by the Cistercians in the 1950s, but by the 1990s they had given up on the insect ridden summers and bitter winters, and moved out. It became a National Guard training HQ but, likewise, those tough guys couldn’t hack it. The present owners bought it for a song, and it must be said that Spero School LLC are categorically not a ‘not for profit’ educational provider.

We are less than halfway through the book when we learn two things; the identity of The Saint, and what happened to Scott Theriault. Also, a spiritualist medium called Sabine Drew is at work in the county, attempting to ‘get a sense’ of what happened to Scott and Mallory. Unfortunately for Kenney and Teal, their last victim, a woman they took to be a prostitute, was something else altogether, and now they have some very dangerous people, with limitless resources, on their track.

Parker’s connection to the world of the supernatural is, of course central to the series, and you either get it or you don’t. Way back in the day, Parker’s wife and daughter were brutally murdered, and now Jennifer, his daughter, occasionally appears to him as some kind of dark angel, not malevolent, but often the harbinger of bad things which are about to happen to her father.

The best thing about the Charlie Parker novels is the peerless prose, sometimes poetic, often violent, but always – always – beautifully addictive. A close second, though, comes the reliable repertory company of subsidiary characters. There’s Moxie Costin, Parker’s lawyer: sharp as a tack, as slick as oil, but actually a deeply moral man. As for the Fulci brothers, Tony and Paulie, they are barrel-shaped human wrecking balls: men who are easy with violence but, once again, with a strange ethical perspective. Then we come to Parker’s longstanding confreres, Louis and his life partner Angel. Louis is, again, a man of violence, his nature tempered by his memories of racial intolerance in The South: Angel; scruffy, Latino, but with an intense intelligence nurtured in a criminal past. Readers, we are in impressive company.

There are two endings to the story, neither of which contradicts the other; the first is purely human and criminal, while the second definitely belongs in another world altogether. A River Red With Blood will be published by Hodder and Stoughton on 7th May. Reviews of earlier novels in the series can be found here.