And so the evening passed.
Eddie Grace woke to the sound of a match being struck in the darkness of his bedroom. The drugs had dulled the pain some, but they had also dulled his senses, so that he struggled for a moment to figure out what time it was, and why he was awake. He thought that he might have dreamed the sound. After all, nobody in the house smoked.
Then a cigarette flared red and a figure shifted in the easy chair to his left; he caught a glimpse of a man’s face. He looked thin and unhealthy, his hair slicked back from his head, his fingernails long and, it seemed, nicotine tinged with yellow. His clothes were dark. Even in his own stinking sickbed, Eddie could smell the dankness of him.
‘What are you doing here?’ said Eddie. ‘Who are you?’
The man leaned forward. In his hand he was holding an old police whistle on a silver chain. It had belonged to Eddie’s father, and had been passed on to him when the old man retired.
‘I like this,’ said the stranger, dangling the whistle by its chain. ‘I think I’ll add it to my collection.’
Eddie’s right hand sought the alarm that summoned Amanda to him. It would ring in her bedroom, and she or Mike would come. His finger pressed down on the button, but he heard nothing.
‘I took the trouble of disconnecting that,’ said the man. ‘You won’t be needing it anymore.’
‘I asked what you were doing here,’ Eddie croaked. He was frightened now. It was the only appropriate response in the face of this man’s presence. Everything about him was wrong. Everything.
‘I’m here to punish you for your sins.’
‘For my sins?’
‘For betraying your friend. For putting his son at risk. For the death of Caroline Carr. For the girls that you hurt. I’m here to make you pay for all of them. You have been judged, and found wanting.’
Eddie laughed hollowly. ‘Fuck you,’ he said. ‘Look at me. I’m dying. Every day I’m in pain. What can you do to me that hasn’t been done already?’
And suddenly the whistle was replaced by a sliver of sharp metal as the man rose and leaned over Eddie, and Eddie thought that he saw other figures crowding behind him, men with hollow eyes and dark mouths who were both there and not there.
‘Oh,’ whispered the Collector, ‘I’m sure I can think of something . . .’
By midnight, the bar was almost empty. The weather report had promised more snow after midnight, and most people had opted to leave early rather than risk driving in a blizzard. Jackie and the Fulcis still sat, bottles racked up before them, but the rest of the customers in the restaurant area were already standing and putting on their coats. Two men at the far end of the bar called for their check, wished me good night, and then departed, leaving only one other drinker at the counter. She had been with a group of Portland cops earlier in the evening, but when they had gone she had stayed, taking a book from her bag and reading it quietly. Nobody bothered her. Although she was small and dark and pretty, she gave off a vibe, and even the International Players of the World kept their distance from her. Still, she looked familiar to me from somewhere. It took me a moment or two, and then I had it. She glanced up and saw me staring at her.
‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘I’m leaving.’
‘You don’t have to,’ I replied. ‘The staff usually stay on for a drink, maybe something to eat, on Friday nights. You’re not in anybody’s way.’
I indicated the glass of red wine at her right hand. There was only a single mouthful left.
‘Fill that up for you?’ I asked. ‘It’s on the house.’
‘Isn’t that illegal after hours?’
‘You going to report me, Officer Macy?’
Her nose wrinkled. ‘You know who I am?’
‘Read about you in the papers, and I’ve seen you around some. You were involved in that business out on Sanctuary.’
‘As were you.’
‘Only at the edges.’ I reached out a hand. ‘My friends call me Charlie.’
‘Mine call me Sharon.’
We shook hands.
‘Shaving cut?’ she asked, pointing at my neck.
‘I have an unsteady hand,’ I said.
‘Bad news for a bartender.’
‘That’s why I quit. Tonight’s a favor for an old friend.’
‘What will you do instead?’
‘What I used to do. They took away my license for a time. Soon, I’ll have it back.’
‘Evildoers beware,’ she said. There was a smile on her face, but her eyes were serious.
‘Something like that.’
I replaced her glass with a clean one, and filled it with the best California we had in the house.
‘Will you join me?’ she said, and when she said those words they seemed to promise, at some point in the future, more than a drink in a dimly lit bar.
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘It would be a pleasure.’
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am immensely grateful to a number of people who gave generously of their time, and their knowledge, when it came to the research for this book. In particular, I would like to thank Peter English, formerly of the Ninth Precinct in New York, who brought its streets to life for me, and without whom this book would be much poorer. Dave Evans and all the staff at The Great Lost Bear (www.greatlostbear.com), the best bar in Portland, Maine, were immensely hospitable, and willing to give a job to a detective who was down on his luck. My thanks also to Joe Long, Seth Kavanagh, Christina Guglielmetti, Clair Lamb (www.answergirl.net), Mark Hall, and Jane and Shane Phalen, all of whom helped me to mask my ignorance at various stages in the writing. Any mistakes are my own, and I apologize for them.
Books and articles that proved useful include New York: An Illustrated History by Ric Burns and James Sanders, with Lisa Ades (Alfred A. Knopf, 1999); The Columbia Guide to America in the 1960s by David Farber and Beth Bailey (Columbia University Press, 2001); The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage by Todd Gitlin (Bantam, 1993); The Movement and the Sixties: Protest in America from Queensboro to Wounded Knee by Terry H. Anderson (Oxford University Press, 1995); The Neighborhoods of Brooklyn, John B. Manbeck, Consulting Editor (Yale University Press, 1998); and ‘Spider manipulation by a wasp larva’ (Nature, Vol. 406, 20 July, 2000).
Thank you to Sue Fletcher, my editor at Hodder & Stoughton in London, and the staff at Hodder; to Emily Bestler, my editor at Atria in New York, and everyone at Atria and Simon and Schuster; to my agent, Darley Anderson, and his wonderful team; and to Madeira James (www.xuni.com) and Jayne Doherty, who look after my Web site but whose kindness and support go far beyond that. I would be lost without you all.
Finally, much love to Jennie, Cameron, and Alistair, who have to put up with all the behind-the-scenes stuff.
John Connolly on the Parker Novels:
‘Since about the second book I’ve thought of the Parker novels as a sequence rather than a series, in that each book develops themes, ideas and plots from the preceding books.’
Although each novel is self-contained, and can be enjoyed as a compelling thriller, collectively the Parker novels form a rich and involving epic sequence in which characters reappear and clues laid down in earlier stories are solved in later ones. Below is a précis of key events in each of the Charlie Parker novels.
Former NYPD Charlie Parker first appears (in Every Dead Thing) on a quest for the killer of his wife and daughter. He is a man consumed by violence, guilt and the desire for revenge. When his ex-partner asks him to track down a missing girl, Parker embarks on a grim odyssey through the bowels of organised crime; to cellars of torture and death; and to a unique serial killer, an artist who uses the human body as his canvas: The Travelling Man. By the end of the novel, Parker realises he is at the beginning of another dark journey – to avenge the voiceless victims of crime: the poor, women and children. It is a journey on which his dead wife and child will be constant ghostly companions.
In Dark Hollow, Parker returns to the wintry Maine landscape where he grew up and becomes
embroiled in another murder hunt. The chief suspect is Billy Purdue, the ex-husband of the dead woman, and Parker is not the only one on his trail. Aided by his friends, hitmen Angel and Louis (first encountered in Every Dead Thing), Parker must go back thirty years into his own grandfather’s troubled past and into the violent origins of a mythical killer, the monster Caleb Kyle. Parker’s personal life seems to take an upward turn in the attractive form of psychologist Rachel Wolfe.
Parker’s empathy with the powerless victims of crime is growing ever stronger. It makes him a natural choice to investigate the death of Grace Peltier in The Killing Kind – a death that appears to be a suicide. The discovery of a mass grave – the final resting place of a religious community that had disappeared forty years earlier – convinces Parker that there is a link between Grace and these deaths: a shadowy organisation called The Fellowship. His investigation draws him into increasingly violent confrontations with the Fellowship’s enforcer, the demonic arachnophile, Mr Pudd. Genial killers Angel and Louis join Parker again as he descends into a honeycomb world populated by dark angels and lost souls.
Parker’s relationship with Rachel reaches a new level in The White Road, but he is still driven to solve the most challenging of cases. A black youth faces the death penalty for rape and murder; his victim, the daughter of one of the wealthiest men in South Carolina. It is a case with its roots in old evil, and old evil is Charlie Parker’s speciality. But this turns out not to be an investigation, but rather a descent into the abyss, a confrontation with dark forces that threaten all Parker holds dear.
Evil men from his past unite to exact a terrible revenge on the private detective. Seemingly unconnected events turn out to be part of a complex and intricate pattern.
The Killing Kind and The White Road effectively form two halves of a single, larger narrative and are probably best read in order.
In “The Reflecting Eye”, a long novella featured in the Nocturnes collection, Parker becomes involved in a curious investigation into a former killer’s abandoned house, and learns that someone, or something, seems be using its empty rooms as a base from which to hunt for victims. This novella introduces us for the first time to the character known as the Collector, an individual who will come to play an important, and sinister, role in the books that follow, most particularly in The Unquiet and The Lovers.
The Black Angel is not an object; it is not a myth. The Black Angel lives. And it is a prize sought for centuries by evil men. Not that Charlie Parker’s latest case starts this way; it starts with the disappearance of a young woman in New York. Her abductors believe that no one will come looking for her, but they are wrong. For Alice is ‘blood’ to Parker’s sidekick, the assassin Louis, and Louis will tear apart anyone who attempts to stop him finding her.
The hunt turns into an epic quest that will take Parker and his team to an ornate church of bones in Eastern Europe and a cataclysmic battle between good and evil. It marks a dawning realisation in Parker that there is another dimension to his crusade, a dangerous dimension that Rachel finds herself increasingly unable to live with.
The Unquiet begins with a missing man, a once respected psychiatrist who went absent following revelations about harm done to children in his care. His daughter believes him dead, but is not allowed to come to terms with her father’s legacy. For someone is asking questions about Daniel Clay: the revenger Merrick, a father and a killer obsessed with discovering the truth about his own daughter’s disappearance. Living apart from Rachel and their child, Charlie Parker is hired to make Merrick go away, but finds strange bonds with the revenger, who has drawn from the shadows pale wraiths drifting through the ranks of the unquiet dead. At the end of the novel comes a tantalising reference to Parker’s own parentage that will inform events in The Lovers.
But first Angel and Louis take centre stage in The Reapers, where the elite killers themselves become targets. A wealthy recluse sends them north to a town that no longer exists on a map. A town ruled by a man with very personal reasons for wanting Louis’s blood spilt. There they find themselves trapped, isolated and at the mercy of a killer feared above all others: the assassin of assassins, Bliss. Thanks to Parker, help is on its way. But can Angel and Louis stay alive long enough for it to reach them?
The bloody events in The Unquiet result in Parker losing his PI licence, so he returns to Maine and takes a job in a Portland bar while the fuss dies down. But The Lovers shows Parker engaged on his most personal case yet: an investigation into his own origins and the circumstances surrounding the death of his father. When he was a boy, Parker’s father, himself a cop, killed a pair of teenagers then took his own life. His actions were never explained. Parker’s quest for that explanation reveals lies, secrets and betrayal. Haunting it – as they have done all his life – are two figures in the shadows, an unidentified man and woman with one purpose: to bring an end to Parker’s existence.
In The Whisperers, Parker is asked to investigate the apparent suicide of Damian Patchett, a former soldier. But this is not an isolated death; former combatants are dying in epidemic quantities, driven by someone or something to take their own lives.
Parker cannot defeat this evil on this own. To combat it, he is forced into an uneasy alliance with a man he fears more than any other. The Collector first appeared in the novella The Reflecting Eye and remains a sinister presence in Parker’s consciousness. It is as though the two men are twin moons orbiting a dark, unknown planet. Now he steps out of the shadows and as their eyes meet, Parker sees for the first time that he himself inspires fear in the Collector.
In The Burning Soul, Charlie Parker becomes reluctantly involved in investigating the abduction of a fourteen-year-old girl
The small Maine town of Pastor’s Bay is the home of Randall Haight, a man with a secret. When he was a teenager, he and his friend killed a girl. He did his time and has built a life for himself, not sharing details of his past with anyone. But someone has found out, and is sending anonymous threatening messages. And Anna Kore – the missing girl – lived in Pastor’s Bay, not two miles away from Haight.
Randall Haight is not the kind of man Charlie Parker wants to help. But he is already drawn to the case of Anna Kore and cannot turn away from the chance to find her. In the course of the investigation he comes up against the police, the FBI and a doomed mobster, Tommy Morris.
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