The instruments of darkness A novel

Can the Charlie Parker series really have reached the quarter-century mark? Every Dead Thing appeared in 1999, and frankly it seems almost impossible, given the situations Charlie has found himself in, that he could have survived this long. And yet here's book number 21, which happens to be one of the best in the series. A woman is accused of murdering her young son. She didn't do it, she says, and her lawyer, the flamboyant Moxie Castin, tends to believe her. So does Charlie, who's been hired by Moxie to investigate the people involved (the accused mother, her estranged husband, a woman with whom the husband had a brief affair). The deeper Charlie digs, the stranger and more unsettling it gets. Connolly is a first-rate storyteller, and the Parker novels have always been excellent, but there's something different about this one. The darkness that permeates the series evolves, as though Connolly is conjuring up an evil we've not seen before. This one will leave readers breathless and shaken--which is, after all, just what the author's fans expect.

In bestseller Connolly's rattling latest case for Charlie Parker (after The Furies), the Maine PI wrestles with potentially paranormal forces as he tries to determine if a young mother killed her own child. Charlie's friend, attorney Moxie Castin, has recently taken on the case of Colleen Clark, whose two-year-old son, Henry, vanished from his bed in the middle of the night. After Colleen's husband suggested to the police that she might have abducted Henry, authorities found a blanket soaked with the boy's blood hidden in her car. Moxie retains Charlie to help ferret out the truth and, after interviewing Colleen at length, he teams up with psychic Sabine Drew, who contacted police after she heard a boy's cries from beyond the grave. Together and apart, the detective and the psychic explore multiple leads, including one that points to the woman Colleen's husband was sleeping with. Meanwhile, sections describing a supernatural force emanating from a house deep within the Maine woods hint that something otherworldly might be interfering with the case--and with the operations of a white nationalist militia called the Stonehurst Foundation, whose members are ramping up for violence in Portland. It's a lot of plates to spin, but Connolly pulls the whole thing off without a hitch. More than 20 years since it launched, this series continues to soar. Agent: Darley Anderson, Darley Anderson Literary. (May)