Good, but not QUITE as great as others in the series

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	• The Black Angel: A Thriller John Connolly HODDER, 2005 - 496 pages average customer review:based on 36 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Good Stuff!

The stories keep getting a little more supernatural as the series continues, and for those who have read his previous books, you won't be disappointed! One of the most entertaining authors I've read.

Dark and deadly

John Connolly is an author with a black streak a mile wide, but it is illuminated by a white hot light of goodness straining to get out. This book is not for the easily disturbed, but the evil in his books are palpable and this one is no exception. It is not for everyone, but he writes books like no one else I have found.

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Are All Fallen Angels Damned?

I thoroughly enjoyed BLACK ANGEL, John Connolly's fifth novel featuring the brooding private investigator Charlie Parker (EVERY DEAD THING, DARK HOLLOW, The KILLING KIND, The WHITE ROAD being the previous four).

BLACK ANGEL begins with Parker helping his friend--and sometime enforcer--Louis to find his missing cousin Alice, a drug addict and prostitute who worked the Bronx's notorious Hunt's Point. Parker and Louis' search for Alice amongst the junkies, hookers and pimps, leads them eventually to the more sophisticated and much more perverse occult circles of secret societies and demon worshippers. A world where Charlie Parker will learn much about himself and what compels him.

For BLACK ANGEL Connolly takes inspiration from a wide variety of religious and occult lore, further blending the genres of detective novel and supernatural thriller, which provides a fresh and enticing spin on familiar themes. Connolly's recently published The UNQUIET continues the Charlie Parker saga.

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Good, but not QUITE as great as others in the series

THE BLACK ANGEL is John Connolly's fifth novel featuring Charlie Parker, a former NYPD detective with a troubled past who now lives in Maine and works as a PI. As in previous installments, BLACK ANGEL is a hardboiled crime novel with supernatural elements, (mostly) told in first-person narrative from Parker's perspective. Also as in previous Parker books, Charlie gets assistance along the way from an interracial gay couple of semi-retired criminals: Angel, a white thief, and Louis, a black hitman.

In this book, Parker gets involved in helping Louis find a missing prostitute/junkie cousin named Alice, who has disappeared under malignant circumstances. Their search leads them to an occult group known as `Believers' who are searching for an ancient relic with supposedly demonic significance. One of Connolly's trademark deformed villains - in this case a corpulent, goiter-stricken, foul-smelling man with the wonderfully incongruous name of `Brightwell' - is among them.

To be honest, I liked this Parker novel slightly less than its predecessors. The main reason is that there are too many slow exposition/backstory/flashback segments. It seemed like at least half the book wasn't even told from Parker's perspective - Connolly's normal SOP is to use these scenes sparingly, but this book almost felt like it should've just been written entirely in third-person.

Much of the backstory was told in the form of flashbacks (often with page after page of italics, which bothers my eyes) to medieval times and World War II. However, I felt that much - if not all - of what was revealed in those flashbacks could've been told or summarized in the `present' story setting much more concisely. This might be a rare case when telling actually does beat showing. (Kind of like Conan Doyle's first Sherlock Holmes story, "Sign of the Four," if you're familiar with it - you can read the book while skipping over the backstory without losing anything.) Also, there was at times simply too much character exposition for minor characters, such as Alice's pimp, G-Mack, among others. I'm sorry, it just wasn't necessary to the story. All in all, I agree with several other reviewers that this book would've benefited by having fifty or a hundred pages sliced out by a ruthless editor.

Despite what may sound like harsh criticism, a lackluster Connolly book is still miles above a `good' novel by many other writers; also, I must stress that BLACK ANGEL only suffers comparatively when held up against its predecessors, which really raised the bar for me. The last third or so of the book did read more like a typical Connolly book: mostly first-person from Parker's perspective, and fast-moving. I really do like the fallen angel mythology, which had been in the background in some other Parker books, but which leaps front-and-center in this one; I also liked the fact that, despite the supernatural element's prominence here, Connolly still treats it somewhat ambiguously - we're never 100% sure just how much of the fallen angel stuff is actually true.

I just finished reading BLACK ANGEL for the third time because I got started re-reading the entire Parker series in order while awaiting my pre-ordered copy of the latest installment, THE REAPERS (which just arrived a few days ago.) Despite this story being a touch under the norm for a Parker tale, it's still a good book and an important part of an excellent series that I highly recommend to fans of hardboiled crime and/or supernatural thrillers. Just one bit of advice: Read `em in order - they'll make a lot more sense that way. (I suspect many of the reviewers who absolutely hated this book hadn't read its predecessors.)

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

" To those who have been forsaken, hell has no geography. The Black Angel begins with the disappearance of a young prostitute from one of New York City's seamiest neighborhoods. Like so many tormented souls before her, the girl's mother is inevitably drawn to Charlie Parker's doorstep desperate for redemption and revenge. Despite the danger that his chosen profession imposes on his wife and newborn daughter, Parker knows that the woman and her troubles cannot be ignored. As always, he is driven as much by the evil that simmers in the hidden honeycomb world as he is by the ties of friendship and blood. As Parker gets closer to the girl's captors, he discovers that her disappearance is linked to a church of bones in Eastern Europe, to the slaughter at a French monastery in 1944, and to the myth of an object known as the Black Angel -- an object considered by evil men to be beyond priceless. But the Black Angel is not a legend. It is real. It lives. It dreams. And the mystery of its existence may contain the secret of Parker's own origins. "

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