Maine

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.

For those new to the series, Charlie Parker is a private investigator from Portland, Maine. He is haunted by a the past, chiefly the murder of his wife and daughter many years ago. In this, the twenty-second in the series, he is hired by lawyer Moxie Costin to investigate the disappearance of a toddler, Henry Clark. After a blanket soaked in his blood is found in the boot of her car, his mother, Colleen, is suspected of his murder, although no body has been found.

Connolly is a master at sowing seeds of doubt and tension. I can think of only one other writer as capable of subtle suggestions of menace and foreboding, and he – Montague Rhodes James – died in 1936. This is a house in the Maine woods, where we suspect evil lurks:

“Some places discourage curiosity. They trigger an ancient response, one that advises us not to linger, and perhaps not even to mention what we might have discovered. Pretend you will never hear, a voice whispers, and it takes us a moment to realise that it is not our own. Be on your way. If you forget me, I might forget you in turn.”

As the search for Henry takes a disturbing turn, It’s not until page 247 that Parker makes the phone call hardened fans of the series have been waiting for. He calls New York and tells Tony Fulci, “They’re on their way.” ‘They’, of course, being Parker’s long time allies, Angel and Louis. They have a certain effect on people. A woman Parker has been interviewing catches site of Angel and Louis outside a store.
“Are they with you?” Beth asked.
“They’re my associates.”
“They don’t look like private detectives. Don’t take this the wrong way, but they look like criminals. If they came into the store, I’d lie down on the floor with my hands behind my head.”
“Sometimes,”I said, ”that’s precisely the effect we seek.”

One of the joys of reviewing the Charlie Parker series is that one can simply let the author speak for himself. Here are a couple of examples where Connolly is in full Raymond Chandler mode:

“Optimistically, if nothing else, the town also posted two inns. Judging by the pictures on its website, the first promised prison mattresses and food to match, while the second screamed Gay Couple Heading For A Messy Divorce. We picked the latter.”

Parker describes a dingy bar:
“Its interior smelled of dust, urine, and drain cleaner, the floor was permanently littered with fragments of shattered glass and broken dreams, and even the furniture had tattoos.”

With the help of an enigmatic woman called Sabine Drew, who has a kind of second sight, Parker realises little Henry’s disappearance is connected to a strange relationship between his father, and a mysterious woman called Mara Teller. It seems that Teller can shape-shift between a desirable delegate at an upmarket business conference, and an unremarkable woman called Eliza Michaud who lives with her brother and sister in an isolated house deep in the forest near the town of Gretton. By the time Parker and his buddies have made the connection between the Michaud family and Henry’s disappearance, warfare has broken out between the Michauds and a collective of far-right hoodlums who have established a camp on the other side of a creek that divides the properties.

John Connolly combines the Meccano nuts and bolts of putting a crime novel together with a poetry that dazzles. Perhaps you don’t believe in the supernatural, but he takes your disbelief, and shakes it to death like a terrier gripping a rat. No living writer connects us to evil in the same way. This is a deeply scary book. It is published by Hodder & Stoughton and will be out on 7th May