Hodder Paperbacks The White Road: A Charlie Parker Thriller: 4

I like the writer

Muy entretenido! Otra novela policiaca de la serie de Charlie Parker, muy recomendable ñ, te engancha desde el principio como todas las del mismo protagonista.

In this next offering by John Connolly, Charlie Parker attempts to prove the innocence of a black man accused of rape and murder in South Carolina and as a result, comes up against the evil and ugly face of Neo-Nazism and the Ku-Klux-Klan. Just another day in the office for private investigator Parker.Parker is content with his life. His girlfriend Rachel is heavily pregnant with his child and they've bought a new house together in Maine. Everything seems to be going right until Parker gets a phone call from an old friend : South Carolina-based defence lawyer Elliott Norton. He is defending a black man, Atys Jones, on the rape and murder charges of a wealthy prominent white woman whose family is so powerful that they own half of South Carolina. Being South Carolina, the verdict of any eventual trial is already a foregone conclusion. Norton asks Parker to come down, sniff around and see if he can come up with concrete proof of Jones' innocence. Of course Jones IS innocent (otherwise we wouldn't have a story) and pretty soon, Parker gets targeted by the wrong people since he has the uncanny knack of pissing everyone off within a hundred mile radius. He soon comes into contact with Ku-Klux-Klan members who are also working and campaigning to get an old nemesis of Parker's released - the Reverend Aaron Faulkner (the bad guy in the last Connolly book - The Killing Kind).Faulkner is a sub-plot of this book. Before leaving for South Carolina, Parker visits Faulkner in prison (the scene in the book reminds you of Lector and Starling in "Silence of the Lambs"). Plus there is a decent chance that Faulkner will be released on bail and the fear is that he will disappear only to re-appear in the future to torment everyone who had him jailed in the first place. Louis and Angel are determined to have Faulkner killed if he is released and they begin to make plans just in case the worst happens.Which brings me to our two friendly assassins. One of the reasons I gave this book 3 stars is that our two amiable shooters hardly ever appear in this book. Angel is struggling mentally to get over his violent encounter with Faulkner so he is hardly ever in this story. He pops up in the middle and the end very briefly. Louis is also not much in it. It's like they decided to sit this one out. So there is virtually none of the usual banter / interaction that usually livens up a Charlie Parker book.Plus Connolly is going off on one of his "I see dead people" trips again. This is really getting tiresome and it affects the credibility of the story when too many ghosts start popping up. Connolly is also getting into the annoying habit of giving us either an in-depth history lesson or a geography lesson in his books. Thanks to Connolly, I am now an expert on the history and geography of Maine and South Carolina. Research is good Mr Connolly but you have the bad habit of over-dosing your readers on too many facts.But the best line of the book has to be when he shows up unexpected at the bad guy's party and Mr Bad Guy comments "we weren't expecting you Mr Parker" to which Mr P replies "oh you know, a few sudden deaths suddenly cleared my schedule". Classic!

Another Charlie Parker book. This was a horrible read, but I couldn't help but finish it. I wouldn't recommend it to the screamish. It wouldn't be everybody's choice.

Dublin-based John Connolly gives his private detective Charlie Parker a little peace after his last adventure in the woods of northern Maine in THE KILLING KIND. Parker has sold his grandfather's house in Scarborough and now shares a new home with his girlfriend Rachel, a criminal psychologist and profiler from Boston who is pregnant with their first child. He also has adopted a golden retriever named Walter.Don't fret, Connolly readers. Your favorite P. I. is soon drawn to darkness when, with Rachel's blessing, he makes a trip to the Deep South to help an old friend investigate the brutal murder of a rich man's white daughter in Grace Falls, S. C. Imprisoned for the crime is a young black lad whose family has had history with the wealthy Larousses since an ancestor flooded their rice fields with salt water many years ago.Parker soon becomes acclimated to South Carolina...and conjures up the villains of the story. Landron Mobley, recently fired from the S. C. Corrections Department in Columbia for having "improper relations" with inmates. Roger Bowen, a neo Nazi and head of the militant racist movement called White Confederacy. The freak Kittim with his "pinkish-purple face with whispy clumps of hair attached to the flaking skull."And we readers are treated to a great visual tour of Charleston, Columbia, and the Congaree River Wilderness of South Carolina: The Inn at Claussen's in Columbia built within the walls of the largest bakery of the South in 1928. The Piggly Wiggly grocery stores. The Citadel, once a fortress, now a military college. The spot where Denmark Vesey and his followers lay slain after their failed slave revolt in 1822. (Connolly must have done his research before the Confederate submarine, the Hunley, was raised from Charleston Harbor in 2000, but adventure writer Clive Cussler and a NUMA team were there.)Meanwhile back in Scarborough, Rachel is being stalked by the hunchback schizo Cyrus Naim, who was incarcerated with the demonic preacher Faulkner (a villain from THE KILLING KIND). Charlie has asked a local policeman named MacArthur, who looks for women in the personal ads of the Portland Phoenix, to check in on her. And hires a black man, who wears a Klan Killer t-shirt and is lactose intolerant, to watch over her, too.I purchased a first US edition of THE WHITE ROAD for my Irish crime collection. Maybe I'll get to the worldwide mystery convention in Cleveland in 2012 and get it signed. What I'd like to do is go back to Ireland and sit in The Gutter Book Shop in Dublin's Temple Bar area. John Connolly will sign my book, and I'll tell him about the Daughters of the Confederacy who wore long black veils and dresses with white gloves and marched behind the funeral cortege of the Hunley crew. And show him a bumper sticker from Roger Bowen's Confederate store that says WHITE BY BIRTH, SOUTHERN BY GRACE. After all, I was born and grew up in South Carolina.From the epilogue: "...together we work...our hands touching, brushing against each other, their presence with us in the breeze on our faces and the water flowing beside us: children gone and children yet to come, love remembered, love remaining; the lost and the found, the living and the dead, side by side together....On the White Road..."