Charlie Parker is a bystander in this tale of kidnapped, mummified children and the hunt by some sort of deity to recover the, There are lots o bad characters on a sort of hierarchy where the most evil are killing off the lesser evil in grotesquely violent ways. Connolly devotes a fair bit of time in giving each of these characters a complicated and detailed background which consumes a large proportion of this book.
Charlie Parker is hired to find a missing boyfriend who turns out to be one of these malcreants and who gives Charlie Parker a beating, including breaking his nose. Parker hangs about on the periphery of this story, not contributing very much and things are resolved largely without his help.
Louis and Angel make cameo appearances, largely represented as drifting into middle age. The Fulci brothers appear in one scene, apparently with no other purpose than to supply a little light relief. Jennifer. Parker’s dead daughter, makes an appearance at the beginning and the end of the book to foretell some sort of future unnamed danger.
It would have been a more honest book if it had been presented as a horror story centred on the multitude of villains and criminals – it certainly wasn’t a Charlie Parker novel, not as we know him.
This is the twenty second of John Connolly’s books I have read and I don’t want to give up on him but I’m afraid the writing’s on the wall. I know I’ll buy the next one but I have a sneaking suspicion it may be the last.
JJ Grafton 