Charlie "Bird" Parker
Created by John Connolly

Client: "Do you hunt?"
Charlie: "No... not animals."
-- from The Wrath of Angels

Abandon Faith, ye who enter here...

Guilt-ridden for drinking bourbon at a bar while his wife and young child were being murdered, CHARLIE "BIRD" PARKER (not to be confused with Connie Sheldon's detective of the same name) quits the New York police department, and promptly goes off the deep end.

Only to re-emerge months later, relatively clean and sober, but still a little too close to the edge for comfort, setting himself up as an unlicensed private eye. In Every Dead Thing, his impressive, Shamus-winning debut, he's called into service by his former partner to do him a favor and search for a missing person. But Charlie's investigation soon uncovers a possible link with the suspected killer of his family, a serial killer known as The Travelling Man, who may or may not have supernatural powers.

Yeah, I know what you're thinking.

"Supernatural"?

But it's not what you think. There's more to these books than a little cookie cutter woo-woo. For Connolly, the "unknown" remains unknown, lending an air of mystery and tension that's as unrelenting as it is unsettling. Connolly truly understands both horror and crime fiction, and his deft blend of the two makes for a powerful and heady brew, resulting in one of the most potent and emotionally wrenching P.I. series in recent memory. And his characterizations are so sharp they could draw blood.

Charlie's since appeared several times since, his cases sometimes walking an increasingly fine line crime and horror fiction, as the line between this world and the next have become even more bluurred.

At first the question was: Is Charlie slowly going off his rocker, or do dead people really speak to him? Or does it even matter, with writing as powerful and often chilling as this?

But as the series has progressed and ventured futher and further into the wild and untamed darkness, it's become clear: 1) Yes, 2) Yes and 3) No.

Connolly's regular gig may have been a journalist for The Irish Times at one point but he gets the States -- particularly his beloeved New England -- down pat here. More, please.

UNDER OATH

• "Every Dead Thing is grim Noir that wreaks havoc on sub-genre stereotypes. Cops do poetry and reference college professors. Professionally lethal hitmen are gay or impotent. Psychic phenomena move the dark tale forward. Yet with all that upheaval to the sub-genre norm, the story line works due to the fact that the characters feel authentic.Though the gore level is in the stratosphere, John Connolly has provided the audience with a non-stop, action-packed tale that also has a warm side where love and loyalty (not DNA) make a person human."
  -- Harriet Klausner
  .
• "Irish journalist Connolly's first novel is an ambitious, grisly, monstrously overextended foray up and down the eastern US and deep into Hannibal Lecter territory. "
  -- Kirkus Reviews

NOVELS

• Every Dead Thing (1999)...Buy this book
• Dark Hollow (2001)...Buy this book
• The Killing Kind (2001).. Buy this book
• The White Road (2002).. Buy this book
• The Black Angel (2005)., Buy this book
• The Unquiet (2007) .. Buy this book
• The Reapers (2008) ...Buy this book
• The Lovers (2009) ...Buy this book
• The Whisperers (2010)....Buy this book
• The Burning Soul (2011).. Buy this book.. Kindle it!
• The Wrath of Angels (2012).. Buy this book.. Kindle it!

COLLECTIONS

• Burning Soul (2011).. Buy this book.. Kindle it!
  No Charlie Parker, as far as I know, but plenty of things that go bump in the night.

Report respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith. And special thanks to Suzanne Sinclair for pointing out the bloody obvious to me.