Dark Hollow (Mass Market Paperback)

Connolly--who seems unconcernedly to be trespassing on Stephen King territory in Dark Hollow, with its Maine setting and echoes of background atrocities--actually brings to mind a slightly different hybridisation of horror and mystery: you might say it's Wilkie Collins re-tooled by James Ellroy. Lurking in his pages is more than a faint whiff of the Victorian triple-decker, with all its gothic complexities, while, at the same time, punctuating the plot are grotesque and excessive acts of sadism of a wholly modern sort that will cause some readers indignantly to close the book.

The trouble is, by doing that they miss a richly ripe, closely textured tale. Connolly's series character, ex-NYPD detective Charlie "Bird" Parker, is a man with a lot of pain to surmount--his wife and child were murdered in Every Dead Thing--but he's also a dogged knight errant attuned to the pain felt by others. In Dark Hollow, his quest for the truth is a twisty one, but he stays the course, and so should you. --Otto Penzler, Amazon.com --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Amazon.co.uk Review
To say that John Connolly enjoyed a remarkable success with his first book,Every Dead Thing, is to understate the case. This first thriller featuring Detective "Bird" Parker was a highly unusual entry in the field, written in a raw, arresting style. But is Dark Hollow, the second appearance of Connolly's fiery and inexorable investigator, equally gripping? Connolly himself has remarked that he wanted to give this new book a very sinister feel, rather than just a gruesome one. In this, he has succeeded triumphantly.

This time, Bird--recovering from the murder of his family by The Travelling Man--returns to the scene of happier times, the wintry Maine of his childhood. But relaxation is once again elusive: another young woman is savagely killed along with a child, and Bird's previous encounter with the victims compels him to track down the murderer. There is an obvious suspect, but Bird believes that the real answer lies 30 years in the past. As the body count increases, it becomes apparent that someone else is hunting for Billy, the dead woman's ex-husband and chief suspect in the slaying. And this dangerous figure appears to know Bird intimately. Before long, the tormented detective is investigating the terrifying origins of a mythical killer: the psychopathic Caleb Kyle.

Along with the kind of riveting storytelling skills we have come to expect from Connolly, the author has built into his narrative a superstructure of striking imagery. Predatory nature and the cycle of the seasons feed into the darker corners of the plot and illuminate the grim psychopathology of the characters. Bird remains the most involving of protagonists--and by dovetailing his hero's troubled past into the search narrative, Connolly ensnares the reader to the past page: "'Nice car', he repeated, and a fat white hand emerged from one of his pockets, the fingers like a thick, pale slugs that had spent too long in dark places. He caressed the roof of the Mustang appreciatively, and it seemed as if the paint would corrode spontaneously beneath his fingers". --Barry Forshaw --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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• Books > Fiction > Authors, A-Z > C > Connolly, John
• Books > Fiction > World > Irish

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