Special Collections
Charlie Parker series by John Connolly
Description: A fusion of crime and the supernatural featuring Charlie Parker, former New York City police officer turned PI. Evil is not a metaphor. #adults
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The Wrath of Angels
by John ConnollyIn the depths of the Maine woods, the wreckage of a plane is discovered. There are no bodies, and no such plane has ever been reported missing, but men both good and evil have been seeking it for a long, long time. What the wreckage conceals is more important than money. It is power: a list of names, a record of those who have struck a deal with the devil.
Now a battle is about to commence between those who want the list to remain secret and those for whom it represents a crucial weapon in the struggle against the forces of darkness.
The race to secure the prize draws in private detective Charlie Parker, a man who knows more than most about the nature of the terrible evil that seeks to impose itself on the world, and who fears that his own name may be on the list. It lures others, too: a beautiful, scarred woman with a taste for killing; a silent child who remembers his own death; and a serial killer known as the Collector, who sees in the list new lambs for his slaughter.
But as the rival forces descend upon this northern state, the woods prepare to meet them, for the forest depths hide other secrets. Someone has survived the crash. Something has survived the crash. And it is waiting. . . .
The Woman in the Woods
by John Connolly&“With its singular characters, eerie subject matter, and socko style&” (The New York Times), this gripping thriller from the internationally bestselling author John Connolly follows Private Investigator Charlie Parker as he is hired to track down the identity of a dead woman—who apparently died in childbirth—and her missing child.In the beautiful Maine woods, a partly preserved body is discovered. Investigators realize that the young woman gave birth shortly before her death. But there is no sign of a baby. Private detective Charlie Parker is hired by a lawyer to shadow the police investigation and find the infant but Parker is not the only one searching. Someone else is following the trail left by the woman, someone with an interest in much more than a missing child…someone prepared to leave bodies in his wake. And in a house by the woods, a toy telephone begins to ring and a young boy is about to receive a call from a dead woman. With breathless pacing and shivery twists and turns, &“this is Connolly&’s masterpiece&” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).
The Wolf in Winter
by John ConnollyThe next pulse-pounding thriller in John Connolly's internationally bestselling Charlie Parker series.The community of Prosperous, Maine has always thrived when others have suffered. Its inhabitants are wealthy, its children's future secure. It shuns outsiders. It guards its own. And at the heart of Prosperous lie the ruins of an ancient church, transported stone by stone from England centuries earlier by the founders of the town... But the death of a homeless man and the disappearance of his daughter draw the haunted, lethal private investigator Charlie Parker to Prosperous.
Parker is a dangerous man, driven by compassion, by rage, and by the desire for vengeance. In him the town and its protectors sense a threat graver than any they have faced in their long history, and in the comfortable, sheltered inhabitants of a small Maine town, Parker will encounter his most vicious opponents yet. Charlie Parker has been marked to die so that Prosperous may survive. Prosperous, and the secret that it hides beneath its ruins...
The White Road
by John ConnollyIn his fourth thriller, international bestselling author John Connolly once again takes readers into the dark world of private detective Charlie Parker, whose deadly fight against evil begins when the daughter of a South Carolina millionaire is raped and murdered.
In South Carolina, a young black man faces the death penalty for the rape and murder of Marianne Larousse, daughter of one of the wealthiest men in the state. It's a case that nobody wants to touch, a case with its roots in old evil, and old evil is private detective Charlie Parker's speciality. But Parker is about to enter a living nightmare, a red dreamscape haunted by the murderous spectre of a hooded woman, by a black car waiting for a passenger that never comes, and by the complicity of both friends and enemies in the events surrounding Marianne Larousse's death.
This is not an investigation. This is a descent into the abyss, a confrontation with dark forces that threaten all that Parker holds dear: his lover, his unborn child, even his soul... For in a prison cell far to the north, an old adversary is about to take his revenge on Charlie Parker, its instruments the very men that Parker is hunting, and a strange, hunched creature that keeps its own secrets buried by a riverbank: the undiscovered killer Cyrus Nairn. Soon, all of these figures will face a final reckoning in southern swamps and northern forests, in distant locations linked by a single thread, a place where the paths of the living and the dead converge. A place known only as the White Road.
The Whisperers
by John Connolly"'Oh, little one,' he whispered, as he gently stroked her cheek, the first time he had touched her in fifteen years. 'What have they done to you? What have they done to us all?'"
In his latest dark and chilling Charlie Parker thriller, New York Times bestselling author John Connolly takes us to the border between Maine and Canada. It is there, in the vast and porous Great North Woods, that a dangerous smuggling operation is taking place, run by a group of disenchanted former soldiers, newly returned from Iraq. Illicit goods--drugs, cash, weapons, even people--are changing hands. And something else has changed hands. Something ancient and powerful and evil.
The authorities suspect something is amiss, but what they can't know is that it is infinitely stranger and more terrifying than anyone can imagine. Anyone, that is, except private detective Charlie Parker, who has his own intimate knowledge of the darkness in men's hearts.
As the smugglers begin to die one after another in apparent suicides, Parker is called in to stop the bloodletting. The soldiers' actions and the objects they have smuggled have attracted the attention of the reclusive Herod, a man with a taste for the strange. And where Herod goes, so too does the shadowy figure that he calls the Captain. To defeat them, Parker must form an uneasy alliance with a man he fears more than any other, the killer known as the Collector. . . .
The Unquiet
by John ConnollyJohn Connolly's originality and talent for storytelling have quickly made him one of today's preeminent thriller writers. Now, in The Unquiet, private detective Charlie Parker returns to untangle a horrifying story of betrayal, unclean desires, and murder -- a story of never-ending evil whose conclusion is not yet written.
Daniel Clay, a once-respected psychiatrist, has gone missing. His daughter insists that he killed himself after allegations surfaced that he had betrayed his patients to foul and evil men -- but when a killer obsessed with uncovering the truth behind his own daughter's disappearance comes seeking revenge, long-forgotten secrets begin to emerge.
Hired by Dr. Clay's daughter to protect her from the predator on the loose, tortured and ingenious private detective Charlie Parker finds himself trapped between those who want the truth to be revealed and those who will go to any length to keep it hidden.
John Connolly masterfully intertwines secret lives and secret sins with the violence that so often lies beneath the surface of the honeycomb world in this gripping page-turner. Fast-paced, hypnotic, and elegantly written, The Unquiet is John Connolly at his chilling best.
A Time of Torment
by John ConnollyDangerous and driven private investigator Charlie Parker returns in the latest gripping thriller of internationally bestselling author John Connolly's series, in which ungodly fears haunt a strange and isolated community.
Jerome Burnel was once a hero. He intervened to prevent multiple killings, and in doing so destroyed himself. His life was torn apart. He was imprisoned, brutalized.
But in his final days, with the hunters circling, he tells his story to private detective Charlie Parker. He speaks of the girl who was marked for death, but was saved; of the ones who tormented him, and an entity that hides in a ruined stockade.
Parker is not like other men. He died, and was reborn. He is ready to wage war. Now he will descend upon a strange, isolated community called the Cut, and face down a force of men who rule by terror, intimidation, and murder. All in the name of the being they serve. All in the name of the Dead King.
A Song of Shadows
by John ConnollyStill recovering from his life-threatening wounds, private detective Charlie Parker investigates a case that has its origins in a Nazi concentration camp during the Second World War.
Parker has retreated to the small Maine town of Boreas to regain his strength. There he befriends a widow named Ruth Winter and her young daughter, Amanda. But Ruth has her secrets. Old atrocities are about to be unearthed, and old sinners will kill to hide their sins. Now Parker is about to risk his life to defend a woman he barely knows, one who fears him almost as much as she fears those who are coming for her. His enemies believe him to be vulnerable. Fearful. Solitary. But they are wrong.
Parker is far from afraid, and far from alone. For something is emerging from the shadows . . .
The Reapers
by John ConnollyA brilliantly chilling novel by New York Times bestselling author John Connolly about a chain of killings, linked obscurely by great distances and the passage of years, and the settling of their blood-debts -- past, present, and future.
As a small boy, Louis witnesses an unspeakable crime that takes the life of a member of his small, southern community. He grows up and moves on, but he is forever changed by the cruel and brutal nature of the act. It lights a fire deep within him that burns white and cold, a quiet flame just waiting to ignite.
Now, years later, the sins of his life are reaching into his present, bringing with them the buried secrets and half-forgotten acts of his past. Someone is hunting him, targeting his home, his businesses, and his partner, Angel. The instrument of revenge is Bliss, a killer of killers, the most feared of assassins.
Bliss is a Reaper, a lethal tool to be applied toward the ultimate end, but he is also a man with a personal vendetta. Hardened by their pasts, Louis and Angel decide to strike back. While they form a camaraderie that brings them solace, it offers them no shelter from the fate that stalks them. When they mysteriously disappear, their friends are forced to band together to find them.
They are led by private detective Charlie Parker, a killer himself, a Reaper in waiting.
The Nameless Ones
by John Connolly&“One of the best thriller writers we have.&” —Harlan Coben, #1 New York Times bestselling author From the international and instant New York Times bestselling author of The Dirty South, the white-knuckled Charlie Parker series returns with this heart-pounding race to hunt down the deadliest of war criminals.In Amsterdam, four bodies, violently butchered, are discovered in a canal house, the remains of friends and confidantes of the assassin known only as Louis. The men responsible for the murders are Serbian war criminals. They believe they can escape retribution by retreating to their homeland. They are wrong. For Louis has come to Europe to hunt them down: five killers to be found and punished before they can vanish into thin air. There is just one problem. The sixth. With John Connolly&’s trademark &“dark, haunting, and beautifully told&” (Booklist) prose and breathless twists and turns, The Nameless Ones is an unputdownable thriller that will keep you on the edge of your seat.
The Lovers
by John ConnollyStripped of his license, Charlie Parker takes a job in a Portland bar. Alone and directionless, he faces at last a shadow he has lived with since his childhood: what made his father, a respected police officer, apparently shoot dead two unarmed teens and then commit suicide.
His quest leads him back to the little New York town where he grew up, to the mysterious history of the NYPD, and to the existence of secret friends and hidden enemies. And waiting in the shadows, as they have been throughout Charlie's life, are a man and a woman with only one purpose: to bring an end to his very existence. . . .
The Killing Kind
by John ConnollyThe body of Grace Peltier, a brilliant Ph.D. candidate, is found in the front seat of her car on a back road in northern Maine. No one wants to believe it was suicide -- not her father, not former U.S. senator Jack Mercier, and not private detective Charlie Parker, who has been hired to investigate the young woman's untimely death. But when a mass grave is accidentally discovered nearby, revealing the grim truth behind the disappearance of a religious community known as the Aroostook Baptists, Parker realizes that their deaths and the violent passing of Grace Peltier are part of the same mystery, one that has its roots in her family history and in the origins of the shadowy organization known as the Fellowship.
Soon Parker is drawn into the dark world of this zealous religious group that has already consumed every person who has dared confront it. When a relic is discovered, one capable of linking the Fellowship to the slaughter of the Aroostook Baptists, Parker is forced into violent conflict with the Fellowship and its enigmatic leader. Haunted by the ghost of a small boy and tormented by the demonic killer known as Mr. Pudd, Parker is forced to fight for his lover, his friends...and his very soul.
A Game of Ghosts
by John ConnollyInternationally bestselling author John Connolly returns with another “superb fusion of noir and the supernatural” (My Bookish Ways) in this latest thriller in his gripping Charlie Parker series.
It is deep winter and the darkness is unending. A private detective named Jaycob Eklund has vanished and Charlie Parker is assigned to track him down. Parker’s employer, Edgar Ross, an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, has his own reasons for wanting Eklund found.
Eklund is no ordinary investigator—he is obsessively tracking a series of homicides and disappearances, each linked to reports of hauntings.
Now Parker is drawn into Eklund’s world: a realm in which the monstrous Mother rules a crumbling criminal empire, in which men strike bargains with angels, and in which the innocent and guilty alike are pawns in a game of ghosts...
Every Dead Thing
by John ConnollyHailed internationally as a page-turner in a league with the fiction of Thomas Harris, this lyrical and terrifying bestseller is the stunning achievement of an "extravagantly gifted" (Kirkus Reviews) new novelist. John Connolly superbly taps into the tortured mind and gritty world of former NYPD detective Charlie "Bird" Parker, tormented by the brutal, unsolved murders of his wife and young daughter. Driven by visions of the dead, Parker tracks a serial killer from New York City to the American South, and finds his buried instincts -- for love, survival, and, ultimately, for killing -- awakening as he confronts a monster beyond imagining...
The Dirty South
by John Connolly&“Mr. Connolly&’s slam-bang thriller is studded with memorable characters and boasts cliffhangers within cliffhangers.&” —The Wall Street Journal &“Brilliant...Connolly is writing at the top of his game.&” —Publishers Weekly, starred review The New York Times bestselling author of A Book of Bones and &“one of the best thriller writers we have&” (Harlan Coben, #1 New York Times bestselling author) goes back to the very beginning of Private Investigator Charlie Parker&’s astonishing career with his first terrifying case.It is 1997, and someone is slaughtering young women in Burdon County, Arkansas. But no one in the Dirty South wants to admit it. In an Arkansas jail cell sits a former NYPD detective, stricken by grief. He is mourning the death of his wife and child, and searching in vain for their killer. Obsessed with avenging his lost family, his life is about to take a shocking turn. Witness the dawning of a conscience. Witness the birth of a hunter. Witness the becoming of Charlie Parker.
Dark Hollow
by John ConnollyWhen John Connolly burst upon the literary suspense scene in 1999, he was an immediate international sensation. His Every Dead Thing became an instantaneous bestseller in England, and here in America, his writing was greeted with extraordinary accolades. He won the prestigious Shamus Award for Best First Private Eye Novel.
Now, Connolly returns with Dark Hollow, a terrifying and ingenious novel of a murderous spree that reaches back decades into the victims' pasts. Back again is ex-New York Police Detective Charlie "Bird" Parker, who has returned to his hometown of Scarborough, Maine, after the vicious killings of his wife and daughter; it is time to leave the bloodstained streets of Manhattan and rebuild his family's house -- as well as his own life. But for Bird, returning to his roots means digging through a mountain of terror, as memories of his father's and grandfather's untimely deaths resurface and drive him to join the manhunt for the killer of yet another mother and child. Though the obvious suspect is Billy Purdue, the violent former husband of the murdered young woman, another player lurks in this disturbing drama, someone entangled in the dark hollow of Bird's past.
Darkly atmospheric, tense and imbued with the page-turning ferocity that only the finest crime fiction offers, Dark Hollow is a stunning successor to Every Dead Thing, a testament to the burgeoning power of John Connolly to tell stories that thrill, frighten and haunt the soul.
The Burning Soul
by John ConnollyWhat's the worst thing you've ever done? "There are some truths so terrible that they should not be spoken aloud, so appalling that even to acknowledge them is to risk sacrificing a crucial part of one's humanity, to exist in a colder, crueler world than before."
Randall Haight has a secret: He is a convicted murderer, a man with the blood of a young girl on his hands. He has built a new life for himself in the small Maine town of Pastor's Bay, but someone has discovered the truth about him. He is being tormented by anonymously sent reminders of his crime. He wants private detective Charlie Parker to make them go away.
But another girl has gone missing, this time from Pastor's Bay itself, and her family has its own secrets to protect. Now, in a town built on blood and shadowed by old ghosts, Parker must unravel a twisted history of violence and deceit involving the police and the FBI, a doomed mobster and his enemies, and Randall Haight himself. Because Randall is telling lies. . . .
A Book of Bones
by John ConnollyPrivate Investigator Charlie Parker returns in this heart-pounding thriller as he seeks revenge against the darkest forces in the world, from &“one of the best thriller writers we have&” (Harlan Coben, #1 New York Times bestselling author) and the internationally bestselling author of the acclaimed The Woman in the Woods.He is our best hope. He is our last hope. He is our only hope. On a lonely moor in northern England, the body of a young woman is discovered. In the south, a girl lies buried beneath a Saxon mound. To the southeast, the ruins of a priory hide a human skull. Each is a sacrifice, a summons. And something in the darkness has heard the call. Charlie Parker has also heard it and from the forests of Maine to the deserts of the Mexican border, from the canals of Amsterdam to the streets of London, he will track those who would cast the world into darkness. Parker fears no evil—but evil fears him. &“A seamless, expansive, and chilling blend of police procedural and gothic horror tale&” (Kirkus Reviews), A Book of Bones will keep you guessing until the very last page.
The Black Angel
by John ConnollyTo those who have been forsaken, hell has no geography. The Black Angel begins with the disappearance of a young prostitute from one of New York City's seamiest neighborhoods. Like so many tormented souls before her, the girl's mother is inevitably drawn to Charlie Parker's doorstep desperate for redemption and revenge.
Despite the danger that his chosen profession imposes on his wife and newborn daughter, Parker knows that the woman and her troubles cannot be ignored. As always, he is driven as much by the evil that simmers in the hidden honeycomb world as he is by the ties of friendship and blood. As Parker gets closer to the girl's captors, he discovers that her disappearance is linked to a church of bones in Eastern Europe, to the slaughter at a French monastery in 1944, and to the myth of an object known as the Black Angel -- an object considered by evil men to be beyond priceless.
But the Black Angel is not a legend. It is real. It lives. It dreams. And the mystery of its existence may contain the secret of Parker's own origins.