The Instruments of Darkness by John Connolly

Published by Atria/Emily Bestler Books on May 7, 2024

At some point in The Instruments of Darkness, Charlie Parker tells a cop that he’s read all the John Sandford novels and believes Sandford is “as good as they come.” There’s no doubt that Sandford is an excellent storyteller. He populates credible plots with strong characters and writes snappy dialog. But John Connolly is also a gifted storyteller. Plus, Connolly’s prose has a literary quality that only a handful of crime writers can match.

Colleen Clark has been charged with murdering her son. She’s hired Moxie Castin to represent her. As usual, Castin has hired Parker to look into the charges. The police don’t have a body or proof of death, but Colleen’s husband says he found a bloody blanket in the trunk of Colleen’s car. The blanket came from their house, making Colleen a prime suspect.

Colleen suffered from postpartum depression and made the kind of remarks that parents typically make about regretting her choice to have a child. Parker believes those facts merit sympathy but knows they’ll be used against her. Her husband called the police when he found the blanket and, this being an election year, a decision was made to prosecute Colleen for manslaughter — with a promised upgrade to murder if the police find evidence that Colleen intended to kill her son.

The setup might seem flimsy, but the prosecution is based on the political reality that it doesn’t look good for the death of a child to go unpunished. Charging Colleen will satisfy the perpetually outraged public and help the career of an attorney general who wants to be governor and a prosecutor who wants to be attorney general. The prosecutor assumes that jurors will ignore the absence of evidence (apart from the bloody blanket) because they will be too outraged to care about reasonable doubt. This is a cynical and entirely accurate view of how the criminal justice system works. “A child was missing and his mother was about to be dragged into the machinery of the law. It chewed people up, the innocent as well as the guilty, and called the result justice, but only a fool would accept that as true.”

Colleen tells Parker that her husband admitted to having an affair but she doesn’t believe he would have killed their son. Parker’s investigation leads to a puzzling inability to find the woman with whom Colleen’s husband had sex. How that plays into Colleen’s innocence or guilt is revealed late in the story.

Connolly usually adds a supernatural element to his stories, both because he sees Maine as a creepy place (it produced Stephen King, right?) and because the supernatural is a way of envisioning evil as a force — the kind of force that is necessary to abduct and kill a child. A key character is a medium who speaks to (or at least hears) the dead. Parker has been known to converse with his dead daughter, so he is open to the woman’s help.

Another force of evil is white supremacy and nationalism, represented here by a group of kooks who live on land that is adjacent to land owned by a family of misfits — a family that seems to be harboring or perhaps ruled by the malevolent force that the medium senses. Connolly describes one of the nationalists as “a frightened creature, fearful of change; fearful of anyone whose color, creed, or language was different from his own; and most of all, fearful of others who refused to follow his path.” That about sums it up.

Parker and his two foot soldiers, Angel and Louis, have had unfortunate encounters with the supremacists before, paving the way for more violence when Parker interferes with their plans. The trio (plus Castin) engage in darkly amusing dialog, balancing dark drama with dark humor.

The Instruments of Darkness blends a detective novel with a horror story, although Connolly downplays the horror to an extent, at least as compared to some of his other books. I prefer detectives to look for clues and, while Parker does that for much of the story, he ultimately relies on the medium to solve the mystery. Still, Connolly maintains tension and ties up every thread by the time the story ends. Charlie Parker novels are always a joy to read, if only for Parker’s guardedly optimistic view of humanity as it struggles against evil. This one is no exception.

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The Nameless Ones by John Connolly

Published by Atria/Emily Bestler Books on October 26, 2021

Charlie Parker makes only cameo appearances in the nineteenth Charlie Parker novel. His dangerous friends Louis and Angel carry the novel, traveling to Europe on a dark mission that places Parker at risk despite his absence. Shaking up the series by giving collateral characters a starring role is a bold move that Parker has made before, always with a strong payoff. The Nameless Ones is one of the best recent efforts from a writer who produces nothing but excellent thrillers.

The Nameless Ones is a tale of two Serbian brothers, Radovan and Spiridon Vuksan. They are villains. The brothers and the criminals who work with or against them dominate the story. Louis and Angel have their moments, but the plot focuses on the brothers’ increasingly desperate attempts to survive the various forces that want to end their existence.

An FBI Agent named Ross has a history with Parker. That history began with the death of Parker’s wife and daughter. More recently, it includes an adventure that Parker had in the Netherlands and the death of a man named Armitage, whose phone (according to Ross) showed communications with the Vuksans. The Vuksans learned from Armitage that their cousin died at the hands of Louis, who was doing a favor for an old friend named De Jaeger. When Spiridon (the less reasonable brother) tortures and kills De Jaeger and his family in a scene that is all the more gruesome for being understated, Louis has new deaths to avenge.

The Vuksans have more enemies than Louis to worry about, but none more formidable. The Serbian and American governments would both like to consign the Vuksans to oblivion. Radovan would like to disappear, although not by dying. He tasks a shady Austrian lawyer named Frend to acquire fake passports that will allow the Vuksans to retire in a foreign land. Spiridon is less interested in retirement. The brothers quarrel about Spiridon’s wish to return to Serbia, where he will surely be punished for his history of war crimes.

Parker novels almost always have an element of the supernatural. In some novels, the supernatural dominates the story. In others, including The Nameless Ones, it lurks in the background. The supernatural element here is a woman named Zorya who kills ruthlessly for Spiridon. Zorya has the appearance of a child but has lived a long existence on the border of life and death. The only thing that frightens her is Parker’s dead daughter.

The novel’s supernatural terror is less frightening than its depiction of the evil war criminals and the various thugs and henchmen who populate their world. Frend, whose estranged daughter conspires against him to help Louis, is one of the novel’s few sympathetic characters, although he is far from a good person. Good people are rare in Charlie Parker novels. On a continuum from purely good to purely evil, Louis and Angel are somewhere in the middle, capable of empathy that motivates extreme but focused violence. Most of the other characters are scattered along the evil side of the continuum, with Spiridon and his ghost woman at the dark end and Riordan approaching it. Ross is the kind of ambiguous character who would rather not know how someone like Louis accomplishes the government’s ends as long as they are accomplished. Series readers might be happy to see the Fulci brothers make a brief return. They provide a bit of comic relief for those who have a taste for very dark comedy.

The novel gives the reader a more informative look at Serbia’s dark history than the rather sunny Wikipedia entry provides. John Connolly brings all of the novel’s locations alive, from Amsterdam to Vienna to South Africa. As always, Connolly’s graceful prose is masterful. He is among my favorite prose stylists in crime fiction. With its dense and intricate plot, its complex characters, and its insightful examination of evil men in evil times, The Nameless One showcases Connolly at the top of his game.

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The Dirty South by John Connolly

Published by Atria/Emily Bestler Books on November 3, 2020

The Dirty South goes back in time to tell the story of Charlie Parker’s first investigation of a homicide after the death of his wife and daughter. Series readers know that Parker’s wife and daughter were murdered, that Parker quit his job as a New York homicide detective to pursue their killer, and that he was eventually successful. When The Dirty South takes place, Parker has only recently started looking into other killings to see if he can find a pattern that will lead him to his family’s killer. That investigation brings him to a small town in Arkansas.

The Cade family owns a good bit of land in Burdon County. Nothing in Burdon County is worth much, but a company called Kovacs is debating the merits of building a new plant in Burdon County rather than a competing site in Texas. The plant would bring much needed employment to a dirt-poor community. The Cade family is doing its best to seal the deal, which means sweeping away any dirt that might discourage Kovacs from building on land owned by the Cades. One of the sweepers is Jurel Cade, who happens to be a deputy sheriff. Jurel has a brother, a sister, and a father who, even more than Jurel, are varying shades of evil.

Among the secrets that the Cades have an incentive to conceal are three murders of young women. The presence of a serial killer might discourage Kovacs from investing in the county. The most recent murder comes to light when Tilon Ward finds Donna Lee Kernigan’s young body in a ditch. Ward’s distress is amplified by the fact that he was giving Donna Lee money in exchange for sex. Ward earns a living cooking meth and was supplying Donna Lee’s mother so that she would look the other way.

Parker is in town taking a look at the two earlier killings, including one that is fairly recent, to decide whether they shed light on the murders of his wife and daughter. They don’t, but his curiosity earns him a night in jail. Donna’s killing takes place while Parker is locked up. When the police chief discovers that Parker is a former New York City homicide detective, he asks Parker for help. The chief knows that giving the investigation to the deputy sheriff will lead to its burial, lest it disturb the decisionmakers at Kovacs.

Parker’s investigation brings him into contact with a number of corrupt individuals, including several suspects who might have committed one or all of the murders. One of the suspects has been missing and presumed dead for about five years. Others include a bartender, a reverend with aspirations for a bigger church, Tilon Ward and the people for whom he cooks meth, and locals with a grudge against the Cades who might want to scuttle the Kovacs deal. All the suspects give the reader a chance to ponder clues and to view the story as a whodunit.

Yet Connolly uses mysteries as a springboard to explore evil as it coincides with human nature. Part of that exploration involves the question of what makes a killer kill. The Dirty South makes the point that monsters often contribute to their own creation, although every monster is shaped by other monsters.

The Dirty South also examines a more encompassing evil. While Burdon County residents might be uncomfortable with the knowledge that a serial killer may be preying on local women, the victims have been black and everyone in the county is likely to benefit from the Kovacs plant, so the business community — and even the state government — has no interest in making waves. A “see no evil” attitude elevates corruption and self-interest above the community’s interest in protecting its most vulnerable members from harm.

Many Charlie Parker novels are grounded in the supernatural. Apart from Parker having a conversation with the ghost of his daughter, the supernatural is only hinted at in this novel, largely by a character who believes the county’s land was poisoned by bad blood in an earlier century.

Depth of characterization and striking prose always characterize Connolly’s fiction. I would say The Dirty South is one of Connolly’s better novels except that Connolly is such a consistent writer that every novel is at the same high level. Instead, I’ll say that The Dirty South is one of the better novels of 2020 for thriller fans to enjoy.

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A Book of Bones by John Connolly

First published in the UK in 2019; published by Atria/Emily Bestler Books on October 15, 2019

A Book of Bones brings an end to the story arc that has developed over the last five or six Charlie Parker novels. The arc involves the efforts of a long-lived man named Quayle and his freakish female friend named Mons to assemble a book called The Fractured Atlas, whose parts have been woven into other books and scattered across Europe and America. When Quayle finishes his reassembly of The Fractured Atlas, a demonic universe of old gods will rip up the fabric of the universe we know, bringing everything to an end.

In A Book of Bones, a fellow named Holmby kills Romana Moon and leaves her body in the moors of Northumbria. The crime troubles the police, but they are even more troubled by what he left inside her body. The killing took place at a site once used by Familists as a place of worship. The Familists were a religious sect that believed all things are ruled by nature rather than God. They have played a key role in the story arc and one of the few remaining Familists assures that Romana is only the first in a series of victims whose deaths will help fracture the universe.

I would find an apocryphal plot of this sort a bit eye-rolling in the hands of most writers, but John Connolly isn’t most writers. He almost had me believing in lost gods and evil beings trapped in church windows. Connolly has a knack for the creepy, but he also has a gift for characterization. Parker is a complex, tormented man whose heroism isn’t based on muscles or skill with a gun but on a steadfast belief that standing up to evil is the right thing to do. In contrast to the parade of tough guys who populate thrillers, Parker is surprisingly gentle and humane. Even his stone-cold killer friend Louis and his burglar friend Angel (who are partnered in a touching relationship) display unusual sidekick depth for the thriller genre.

I’m glad to see the story arc conclude because the supernatural really isn’t what I look for in thrillers. I nevertheless recommend the entire series without reservation because Connolly is one of the best prose stylists in thrillerdom. There is quite a bit of prose in A Book of Bones (it weighs in at nearly 700 pages) but the story is never padded, the plot never drags, and there is never a confusion of characters. I credit that to Connolly’s craftsmanship as a storyteller. Connolly apparently plans to return Parker to his detective roots in the next book, without making the supernatural a key plot element. That’s fine with me, but anything Connolly does is fine with me. He’s just a joy to read.

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The Woman in the Woods by John Connolly

Published by Atria/Emily Bestler Books on June 12, 2018

Few writers of suspense novels care more about language than John Connolly. He marries eloquent prose to the poetry of the street. He also imbues his characters with extraordinary depth, and imbues the (relatively speaking) good characters with extraordinary humanity. Or maybe he simply gives them ordinary humanity, which seems extraordinary in a time when so many people have forgotten how to care about members of the human race who differ in race or ethnicity or religion or sexuality or politics.

A fellow named Dobey who shelters troubled women in a dismal place called Cadillac, Indiana receives a visit from Quayle, accompanied by a woman who goes by the name Padilla Mors, her real name having been lost to history. Mors is “death’s personification,” as she demonstrates repeatedly during the course of the novel.

Quayle is searching for Karis Lamb, one of the unfortunate women Dobey has assisted, who told Dobey she was running from the devil himself. Meanwhile, Karis (who happens to be dead) is talking to a kid named Daniel Weaver on Daniel’s toy phone. She wants Daniel to join her in the woods. Daniel understandably believes that’s not a good plan, as does Charlie Parker’s dead daughter Jennifer, who hopes to guide him on a safer path.

As readers know from other novels in the series, Quayle is trying to reconstruct something called the Fractured Atlas, which will “reorder the world in its image,” beginning with the return of the Not-Gods. Quayle is at odds with a powerful group of men who support the Buried God in what they perceive to be an upcoming clash with the Not-Gods, because reconstructing the Fractured Atlas is likely to turn the world to fire and ash, which isn’t good for anyone, except possibly the Not-Gods. I’m not sure what any of that means, but it’s pretty spooky.

As that plot unfolds, Parker deals with the aftermath of his buddy Louis’ decision to blow up a pickup truck that was decorated with Confederate flags (in Maine, of all places). Blowing it up might have been an overreaction, but Louis’ lover Angel is facing death and Louis was having a bad day. The scenes in which Louis contemplates and dreads the loss of Angel are deeply moving. They are some of Connolly’s finest work although really, it’s all good. Connolly is incapable of writing a graceless sentence.

I’m generally not a fan of supernatural themes, but Connolly always ties his fiction to the corporeal world — in this book, to abused women, a more tangible horror than ghosts and demons. In a time when (as Parker observes) rage, intolerance, and ignorance are worn as a badge of pride, reading a Charlie Parker novel is a civilizing experience. Evil plagues Parker, not just in supernatural manifestations, but in humans who believe that their skin color or sexual identity or religious affiliations are a mark of moral superiority. A good many Americans agree with Parker’s belief in tolerance and equality, but too many others pollute the nation with their ignorant remarks and vile actions.

I wouldn’t recommend The Woman in the Woods to readers who haven’t read the last few Charlie Parker novels, because they work together as a continuing story. I recommend the series as a whole to fans of exquisite prose who can deal with disturbing themes, because each one is better than the last.

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