Black Angel by
John Connolly
pbk out February 06
(Hodder)
at £6.99
After a break from the Parker series with the admirable collection Nocturnes, in which he indulged his taste for the macabre to fine effect through the medium of traditional Gothic/Horror shorts (invoking Lovecraft and Poe, Vicars and Vampires on the way) Connolly here returns to his usual format with this, the latest case for the angst ridden Maine P.I. Charlie Parker and his associates Louis and Angel.
The plot kicks off in a conventional enough fashion: Louis's aunt from back home turns up in the city hunting for her daughter, Alice, who has taken to the streets in a big way getting deep into drugs and using any means she knows to support her habit. Against the wishes of his wife Rachel and in-laws and against his own fatherly instincts, Parker decides to take the job of finding the girl and returning her to her home. So far so everyday, but this being a Connolly novel we know Parker's never going to get a straightforward missing person case.
Bad things are happening in the city, things to which April's disappearance is linked: someone is fashioning elaborate sculptures from human bone, very odd people are showing up, Parker is
having bad dreams, people are getting killed. From the initially banal premise, by way of the
search for Alice, the plot takes a wild turn into an exhumation of the malevolent underbelly of
church history. Connolly leads us through a landscape in which demons, monks, Nazis, Mexican
cultists and esoteric art collectors follow the dictates of an obscure biblical text to deadly ends.Parker has to deal with much more than a few hopped up pimps.
Anyone who is familiar with the Parker series will know the score. Connolly is a writer who mixes the Horror and Crime genres in a unique fashion, alternating between passages of Chandleresque wisecracking and full blown King like horror with abandon. Not always easy this as the two are not natural bedfellows, but in The Black Angel as in previous titles in the series Connolly makes light of the task, weaving Parker's hallucination - like musings on fate, guilt, death, ghosts and redemption with the traditional P.I. trappings and keeping us on just the right side of reality, leaving this reader thinking that Parker's maybe just self - delusional in some of his conclusions or maybe he's just got an over active imagination….and all is normal on the Maine streets…..Maybe?
One to keep you up at night.
Black Angel by
John Connolly
