September 27, 2010
Holter Graham's breathless, bordering on melodramatic delivery is an appropriate fit for private detective Charlie Parker's latest battle with otherworldly evil. The labyrinthine plot has the sleuth confronting his old foe, the Collector, while investigating the suicides of Iraq War veterans who were also guilty of smuggling valuable artifacts out of the country. Graham is particularly effective in maintaining a rat-a-tat pacing for the novel that sounds like a mashup of Raymond Chandler and Dean Koontz. He provides Charlie with a hard-boiled but sensitive sensibility, but is equally on target with the properly disquieting raspy voice of the Collector and the serpentlike sibilance of a sinister killer named Herrod. He also has an effective interpretation for the title creatures' mutterings. Connolly sacrifices some of the novel's tension with a protracted discussion of the PTSD suffered by soldiers during the Iraq War; Graham handles those sections briskly, while maintaining their informational value. An Atria hardcover (Reviews, May 31).
Starred review from May 31, 2010
Ancient artifacts and the second Iraqi War provide the backdrop for Connolly's outstanding ninth novel featuring PI Charlie Parker (after The Lovers). When the former NYPD homicide detective looks into the suicide of an Iraq war veteran, he discovers that several members of the soldier's unit have also killed themselves and that they may have been involved in smuggling looted treasures into the U.S. Parker begins to fear that the returning soldiers have brought back more than their own personal demons. As he races to find an antique golden box before it falls into the wrong hands, Parker discovers that he's being shadowed by the enigmatic Collector, a repulsive killer whose nature is as problematic as that of Parker himself. Connolly displays a real knack for fusing the detective and horror genres, providing a rational chain of evidence and deduction for the plot while simultaneously creating a real atmosphere of numinous dread that reminds us that mystery can refer to more than a mundane tale of crime and human justice.