John Connolly’s bestselling Charlie Parker series of crime thrillers is highly rated across the board: every book in this 11-book series (so far) has an average review rating of 4/5 stars or higher!
Every Dead Thing (4/5 stars, currently priced at $6.83)
Hailed internationally as a page-turner in a league with the fiction of Thomas Harris, this lyrical and terrifying bestseller is the stunning achievement of an “extravagantly gifted” (Kirkus Reviews) new novelist.
John Connolly superbly taps into the tortured mind and gritty world of former NYPD detective Charlie “Bird” Parker, tormented by the brutal, unsolved murders of his wife and young daughter.
Driven by visions of the dead, Parker tracks a serial killer from New York City to the American South, and finds his buried instincts — for love, survival, and, ultimately, for killing — awakening as he confronts a monster beyond imagining…
Dark Hollow (4.5/5 stars, currently priced at $7.69)
When John Connolly burst upon the literary suspense scene in 1999, he was an immediate international sensation. His Every Dead Thing became an instantaneous bestseller in England, and here in America, his writing was greeted with extraordinary accolades. He won the prestigious Shamus Award for Best First Private Eye Novel, and, as the San Francisco Examiner wrote, “John Connolly’s tale is as riveting and chilling as Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs and James Patterson’s Kiss the Girls.”
Now, Connolly returns with Dark Hollow, a terrifying and ingenious novel of a murderous spree that reaches back decades into the victims’ pasts. Back again is ex-New York Police Detective Charlie “Bird” Parker, who has returned to his hometown of Scarborough, Maine, after the vicious killings of his wife and daughter; it is time to leave the bloodstained streets of Manhattan and rebuild his family’s house — as well as his own life.
But for Bird, returning to his roots means digging through a mountain of terror, as memories of his father’s and grandfather’s untimely deaths resurface and drive him to join the manhunt for the killer of yet another mother and child. Though the obvious suspect is Billy Purdue, the violent former husband of the murdered young woman, another player lurks in this disturbing drama, someone entangled in the dark hollow of Bird’s past.
Darkly atmospheric, tense and imbued with the page-turning ferocity that only the finest crime fiction offers, Dark Hollow is a stunning successor to Every Dead Thing, a testament to the burgeoning power of John Connolly to tell stories that thrill, frighten and haunt the soul.
The Killing Kind (4.5/5 stars, currently priced at $6.83)
His two previous novels, Every Dead Thing and Dark Hollow, were international bestsellers. Now the “compulsively readable” (Publishers Weekly) John Connolly confirms his position as one of our leading crime novelists with a story of superb menace and style.
The body of Grace Peltier, a brilliant Ph.D. candidate, is found in the front seat of her car on a back road in northern Maine. No one wants to believe it was suicide — not her father, not former U.S. senator Jack Mercier, and not private detective Charlie Parker, who has been hired to investigate the young woman’s untimely death.
But when a mass grave is accidentally discovered nearby, revealing the grim truth behind the disappearance of a religious community known as the Aroostook Baptists, Parker realizes that their deaths and the violent passing of Grace Peltier are part of the same mystery, one that has its roots in her family history and in the origins of the shadowy organization known as the Fellowship. Soon Parker is drawn into the dark world of this zealous religious group that has already consumed every person who has dared confront it. When a relic is discovered, one capable of linking the Fellowship to the slaughter of the Aroostook Baptists, Parker is forced into violent conflict with the Fellowship and its enigmatic leader. Haunted by the ghost of a small boy and tormented by the demonic killer known as Mr. Pudd, Parker is forced to fight for his lover, his friends…and his very soul.
“This is a honeycomb world. It hides a hollow heart,” writes John Connolly. In The Killing Kind, he has once again created a world of love and hate, of tenderness and violence. Hailed by critics as “one of the best of the genre” (Toronto Sun), his intense, poetic prose and his terrifying clan of characters are sure to thrill even the most discerning suspense reader.
The White Road (4/5 stars, currently priced at $6.83)
John Connolly thrilled readers with his bestselling novels, Every Dead Thing, Dark Hollow, and The Killing Kind. Now he delivers spellbinding suspense as Charlie Parker races to unravel a brutal crime committed in the Deep South.
After years of suffering unfathomable pain and guilt over the murders of his wife and daughter, private detective Charlie Parker has finally found some measure of peace. As he and his lover, Rachel, are awaiting the birth of their first child and settling into an old farmhouse in rural Maine, Parker has found the kind of solace often lost to those who have been touched by true evil.
But darkness soon descends when Parker gets a call from Elliot Norton, an old friend from his days as a detective with the NYPD. Now practicing law in Charleston, South Carolina, Elliot is defending a young black man accused of raping and killing his white girlfriend, the daughter of a powerful Southern millionaire. Reluctantly, Parker agrees to help Elliot and by doing so ventures into a living nightmare, a bloody dreamscape haunted by the specter of a hooded woman and a black car waiting for a passenger who never arrives. Beginning as an investigation into a young woman’s death, it is a fast-moving descent into an abyss where forces conspire to destroy all that Parker holds dear.
Hailed as a “master storyteller” (The London Express) by critics stateside and abroad, Connolly has once again delivered a riveting and suspenseful story that draws readers toward the horrifying crossroads of the past and present, of the living and the dead. “We are trapped not only by our own history but by the histories of all those with whom we choose to share our lives,” he writes. As chillingly as it is beautifully rendered, The White Road is sure to tread a frightening path for even the most world-weary crime fiction fan.
Click here to browse the full catalog of Charlie Parker crime thrillers.