Not his best, but certainly not bad!

books:


	• Dark Hollow John Connolly Pocket, 2002 - 528 pages average customer review:based on 44 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Here there be monsters.

Charlie Parker, the ghost-seeing policeman turned detective after his wife and daughter are killed, returns to his home town. Old nightmares are revisited as he is confronted with the murder of yet another mother and child.

I still think that my favorite Connolly is The Book of Lost Things. A fractured fairy tale gave Connolly the room and structure he needed to really shine as a novelist. These Charlie Parker novels are kind of great, but are also kind of big messes. Connolly tosses in so many aspects to his haunted detective that he achieves energy at the expense of a streamlined plot. I like them because they are genre-busting-- more monster movies than detective novels. I like them for a lot of reasons, actually. I do wish that they were a little bit less all over the map.

Anyhow, this is the third Charlie Parker book that I have read-- The White Road and Every Dead Thing were the other two. The quality and tone are quite comparable, so it should not disappoint people who are already fans of the series.

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Not his best, but certainly not bad!

While I have immensely enjoyed two other Connolly novels, this one wasn't quite as engrossing. The plot was surprising, but I just can't rate this one as high as his others. I hope that his next book, The Killing Kind, recaptures some of this lost magic.

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Fear In The North Woods

I really liked the setting of this story in Northern Maine. The characters are as ruggged as the environment in which they live and who is better to solve these countless murders than a retired cop from NYC, Charlie Parker. Charlie has a lot of help from his friends, Louis and Angel.

This story was very good, a real attention grabber once you got into it; it has it's ghosts, fear, suspense, murder, and terror. It has a lot of supernatural events and ghostly dreams throughout. It was hard for me to put everthing together in the beginning, but a little patience paid off and this was a very good and fast read that kept me on the edge of my seat.

This will be a series that I will certainly read more of.

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Great sequel to EVERY DEAD THING

DARK HOLLOW is the sequel to John Connolly's debut novel, EVERY DEAD THING. Like the latter book, HOLLOW stars former NYPD detective Charlie Parker, a recovering alcoholic whose wife and daughter were horrifically murdered while Parker was drunk in a bar; HOLLOW is set roughly a year from when those murders took place. Parker has moved back to Maine, where he spent much of his adolescence, and is living in and restoring his grandfather's old house when a mob deal nearby goes bad and results in Mafiosi and freelance hitmen (in the form of two deviants named Abel and Stritch) descending upon the area.

Parker gets involved when he helps a family friend collect child-support money from her thuggish ex; the money, it turns out, is linked to the aforementioned bad deal. The mob and the freelancers come after Parker. Parker's friends Angel and Louis, an interracial, homosexual thief-and-hitman (respectively) couple, come in to help Parker. And lurking at the periphery of it all is Caleb Kyle, a demonic specter of a serial killer who had tormented Charlie's grandfather decades ago. The violence and suspense escalates from there.

Though the plot may sound complex, Connolly spins it all together in a way that isn't tough to follow and makes sense. As always, Connolly does a masterful job of evoking setting and character, and nails the dialogue more often than not, doubly impressive when one takes into account that Connolly is an Irishman writing about American characters in American settings.

I just finished reading this book for the third or fourth time, if that tells you anything about how much I like the Parker series. I'm eagerly awaiting my pre-ordered copy of Connolly's latest, THE REAPERS, which is coming out later this month, and to kill time I'm rereading all the preceding books in the series.

As I noted in my review of EVERY DEAD THING, the best way to conceive of Connolly's style is to imagine a hardboiled crime novelist (such as Dashiel Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, or James Lee Burke) doing a 1st-person narrative, toughguy PI series that has some supernatural overtones. This genre-blending element (ie, crime + horror)is subtle in EDT and even subtler in HOLLOW, but it tends to increase in Connolly's later books. It differentiates Connolly both from other noir/hardboiled authors, and from stereotypical `mystery' writers. The latter tend to focus on creating a difficult puzzle to be solved by cold-blooded logic or flawless forensics. `Crime' writers, on the other hand, are less interested in the mystery than they are with characters - those who commit crimes, those who solve them, those who are victims of them, etc.

If you like hardboiled crime/noir, and you don't mind a little genre-mixing, you aren't bothered by a fair amount of violence, and you won't be offended by the fact that the protagonist's main sidekicks are a gay couple, you'll get a kick out of Connolly's Charlie Parker novels. I thought DARK HOLLOW was, if anything, a little better than EVERY DEAD THING -- it's a tighter, more focused story, and Connolly really seems to connect with Maine as a setting in an even more profound way than he did with New York, Virginia, and Louisiana, which were the settings of EDT.

That said, I'd still recommend starting with the first book and reading the series in order - EDT is still a great book, and I think it definitely makes more sense when you read them in order anyway.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

Internationally acclaimed author John Connolly thrilled readers with his debut bestseller, Every Dead Thing. Now he gives a new name to fear with this atmospheric, spine-tingling page-turner.

DARK HOLLOW

Haunted by the murder of his wife and daughter, former New York police detective Charlie Parker retreats home to Scarborough, Maine, to rebuild his shattered life. But his return reawakens old ghosts, drawing him into the manhunt for the killer of yet another mother and child. The obvious suspect is the young woman's violent ex-husband. But there is another possibility -- a mythical killer who lurks deep in the dark hollow of Parker's own past, a figure that has haunt....

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