John Connolly - The Lovers

Review by Ro Bennett on show 25th March
This is the latest book about Charlie Parker. It’s another dark, scary book by John Connolly and I don’t know why I read them except that I worry about Charlie and the people close to him as they are all very vulnerable to extreme danger.

The scene is set in the book Every Dead Thing which was printed in 1999: Homicide cop Charlie "Bird" Parker was drunk when the killer known as the Travelling Man dissected his wife and his daughter. Parker's guilt and obsession with revenge have taken him well beyond the law, causing him to beat a pimp to death and accept the friendship of a notable hitman. Leaving mayhem and destruction in his wake, Parker finds every private investigation he takes leading him back to his family's killer--is this an obsession, or is he treading a maze of murder built just for him?

The books develop and build on this theme and you need to read them chronologically. You could read them out of sequence, but if you do, you won’t get the sense of mystery and the subtle hints about something deeper going on.

This book ties up several loose ends - but right from the beginning you are nervous about the welfare of his ex partner Rachel, his two year old daughter Sam and his dog even, because you know that is evil is abroad and wanting to hurt and destroy him and you know what happened to his first wife and daughter.

In the Lover, Charlie is working in a bar, he’s been deprived of his investigator’s licence, including his right to carry a gun, which makes it all even more hazardous. He decides to look into his policeman fathers suicide and the killing of a young couple allegedly by his father when Charlie was a young lad. Why did this mild mannered, respected police officer shoot two apparantly innocent young people and then take his own life? In this book we find out why and it goes back to the beginning, the cause, of the horror, violence and loss Charlie has endured throughout his life.

It’s a gripping book, a page turner, it’s scary, loads of blood and gore and grizzly bits and a supernatural element which adds to the dimension - the threat that the baddies can come back to wreak havoc in his life in the future.
The books leave me feeling unsettled and although I can’t put them down, when I’ve finished them I think, ‘Why on earth would I want to read something like this?’
Ro Bennett