The Wrath of Angels: The Eleventh Charlie Parker Thriller [Hardcover]

Mr Connolly is on top form again with this story of something lost and sought in the deep forests of Maine. Although his stories are never a riot of laughs, this one in particular breathes an air of foreboding almost from the start and the sense of menace only grows. It's difficult to describe the plot without spoilers but some characters we've met before reappear (and I don't just mean Angel and Louis although they do) including one we thought was dead and the forest is almost a character in its own right. We also get a sense that Charlie and his friends are beginning to age.

My only complaint is that we are still no nearer to finding out what Charlie Parker *is* even if we find out what he is not.

This is the best Charlie Parker story so far. The plot is as dark as The Unquiet (albeit not as stomach churning) and it serves as a sequel to my favorite John Connolly book, The Dark Angel.

If you're new to Charlie Parker I wouldn't recommend reading this first. Start with Every Dead Thing and work your way through the series. By the time you get to Wrath of Angels you'll hopefully be as obsessed and mesmerized as I am.

This really is a masterpiece of supernatural Gothic noir. The only bad thing about this book is that there won't be another Charlie Parker story for a while.

If you go down to the woods today you're sure of a big, and in true John Connolly fashion, quite nasty surprise in this the eleventh, in the Charlie Parker series. Fear not if this is your first step into the dark, supernatural tinged tales from the pen of Mr Connolly as there is just the right amount of back story to bring you right up to speed as to why everyone behaves in the way that they do, and the numerous, and at times more than a bit scary skeletons that reside in Parker's closet which delight in coming back to bite him on the derriere. If you're a seasoned fan of the unholy trinity of Charlie, Louis and Angel step right in and prepare to be entertained- this is a corker with more than a few familiar faces along the way...
Despite my more than a bit flippant intro to my review this is indeed one of the darkest tales yet featuring Charlie Parker and there is a suffocating miasma of evil throughout the whole affair with most characters being touched in some way by this atmosphere of death and misery. From the opening scene of a dying old man's confession of a past sin to a sinister path of discovery towards a hidden list of doomed souls, Connolly weaves a convoluted tale that is murderous, tangential and twisting hither and thither with all the main protagonists being expertly drawn together for a bloody denouement. As I alluded to earlier, the recurring characters all have a part to play and with the reappearance of the wonderfully sinister Kushiel (or `The Collector') and with a couple of other nasty surprises, there is more than enough to keep Parker on the back foot throughout the novel as they close in for different reasons to the acquisition of the list, languishing in the wrecked fuselage of a crashed plane in the backwoods of Maine. As regular readers of Connolly know, there is a strict adherence in his writing that no-one can really be perceived as 'good'( and spookily in this tale not even children as one character more than proves)- there is an element of badness within all the main characters with strikingly different reasons for the course of their actions and how this 'badness' manifests itself in their own tarnished views of the world. There is always a balance between depraved cruelty and loving heroism and this is what sets Connolly apart from just being a mainstream crime writer as his books always give the reader something more to think about on the human condition, as well as his ability to construct a good yarn...
There is a carefully used quote at the outset of the book from artist Andrew Wyeth that says "I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape- the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn't show" and what was particularly striking in this novel was Connolly's adherence to the naturalistic writing style prevalent in the formative period of American fiction in his depiction and realisation of the potency of the natural environment within this tale. The natural setting of the woods is instrumental to the thrust of the plot and his perfectly rendered descriptions of the beauty but inherent malevolence of the natural world are perfectly realised. Skilfully interweaving folkloric tales into the plot, the woods and their surrounds become like another character in the book and influence greatly the actions of the human characters within its confines as it seeks to conceal the evidence of evil that the protagonists are seeking with a grail-like intensity...
But even within the darkness of the plot there are elements of humour particularly in the interplay of Charlie, Louis and Angel on a particularly eventful evening babysitting Parker's daughter Sam and in the description of the most depressing `titty bar'on the planet to name but two, and these interludes of playful joshing or pure wit do much to lighten the sinister atmosphere that prevails within the rest of the novel.
All in all another great read in an always entertaining, yet wonderfully disturbing series that deviates enough from being strictly crime writing to incorporate moments of pure horror but beautifully balanced with a literary, naturalistic and philosophical bent- what more could any reader ask for?