Every Dead Thing by
John Connolly
pbk out October 99
(Coronet)
at £5.99
There is a new phenomenon in crime fiction publishing -- the New Year First Novel Hype. Last year, readers were invited to compare Kathy Reichs with Patricia Cornwell; this year, we are asked to judge how Irishman John Connolly's debut measures up to The Silence of The Lambs.
Few writers could bear the weight of such expectations. To lay such a burden on first-time novelists must be a pressure most could do without, even if it is accompanied by the sort of marketing hype that guarantees success at the book shop tills.
Every Dead Thing is a serial killer thriller that aims to take on the Americans at the game they play so well. Charlie 'Bird' Parker was a career cop who drank as hard as he worked until the night he came home from the bar to find his wife and daughter had become the victims of a sadistic killer whose ultimate depravity is literally to steal the faces of his victims.
Parker's obsessive hunt for the murderer leads him to quit the NYPD and scour the country for any possible lead. One such is a tip from an FBI man he'd worked with previously, who takes him to a Louisiana swamp where an old woman with second sight tells of a killer called the Travelling Man who has stripped a girl of her face and dumped her somewhere in the unmapped bayou.
Parker's desperate search leads him further into the grip of the bottle, until he becomes the very thing he seeks -- a blood-crazed killer. The realisation sobers him in both senses and he returns to New York.
Then his ex-partner asks him to find a missing woman. What should have been a straightforward inquiry leads Parker into the dark heart of small-town America and the discovery that his target is the sister of a child who was murdered by pair of serial killers years before.
Soon he realises that the past is far from dead and his own violence resurfaces as he goes head to head with a Mafia family in a bloody quest to nail a pair of vicious paedophile killers. With an arsenal of guns and the help of the charming black hitman Louis and his boyfriend Angel, Parker succeeds in avenging the deaths of their dozens of victims.
Then Parker gets a call from the daughter of the old woman in Louisiana. By the time he can respond to her call for help, the Travelling Man has left his particular calling card. The old woman and her son have been skinned alive, their faces gruesomely stripped to bloody flesh and bone.
Aided by Louis, Angel, and profiler Rachel Wolfe, Parker throws himself into the hunt again, this time finding himself embroiled in local Louisiana gang warfare. But this time, it's very personal. By the final confrontation between hunter and hunted, it seems that everyone Parker touches is marked out as the next target. And killing the killer only brings more pain in its wake. Every Dead Thing is a competent and sometimes disturbing thriller which Connolly's writing lifts above the average. However, there are no real surprises here, no fresh ground broken. The killer's identity fails to shock, and there is no credible explanation for what turned him into a bloody vengeful artist in murder.
Where Connolly fails most significantly is in the ambience of the novel. Although he has clearly done his research, both into the psychology of the serial killer and into his locations, there is none of the brooding atmosphere of terror that the truly haunting thriller needs.
For example, the final part of the book is set in and around New Orleans, an area that has provided the dark background for some great noir fiction from writers like James Sallis, Gold Dagger winner James Lee Burke and Anne Rice. But Connolly fails to convey that atmosphere, settling instead for the kind of descriptions provided by the superior sort of guide book.
'The Most Terrifying Thriller Since Silence Of The Lambs'? No. Well worth a read? Probably…
(
Val McDermid
- Gold Dagger winner & creator of Lindsay Gordon, Kate Brannigan & Tony Hill)
Every Dead Thing by
John Connolly