The Furies

Charlie Parker’s investigations draw him into a world of modern furies; goddesses of vengeance.

The Furies: mythological snake-haired goddesses of vengeance, pursuers of those who have committed unavenged crimes. Now, private investigator Charlie Parker is drawn into a world of modern furies. In The Sisters Strange, the return of the criminal Raum Buker to Portland, Maine brings with it chaos and murder, as an act of theft threatens not only to tear apart his own existence but also that of Raum’s former lovers, the enigmatic sisters Dolors and Ambar Strange. And in The Furies Parker finds himself fighting to protect two more women as the city of Portland shuts down in the face of a global pandemic, but it may be that his clients are more capable of taking care of themselves than anyone could have imagined....

Two novels in one from the master of the modern supernatural thriller. 

Shadow Voices: 300 Years of Irish Genre Fiction: A History in Stories

The story of genre fiction - horror, romantic fiction, science fiction, crime writing, and more - is also the story of Irish fiction. Irish writers have given the world Lemuel Gulliver, Dracula, and the world of Narnia. They have produced pioneering tales of detection, terrifying ghost stories and ground-breaking women's popular fiction. Now, for the first time, John Connolly's one volume presents the history of Irish genre writing and uses it to explore how we think about fiction itself.

Deeply researched, and passionately argued, SHADOW VOICES takes the lives of more than sixty writers - by turns tragic, amusing, and adventurous, but always extraordinary - and sets them alongside the stories they have written, to create a new way of looking at genre and literature, both Irish and beyond. Here are vampires and monsters, murderers and cannibals. Here are female criminal masterminds and dogged detectives, star-crossed lovers and vengeful spouses.

Here are the SHADOW VOICES.

The Nameless Ones

In Amsterdam, four people are butchered in a canal house, their remains arranged around the crucified form of their patriarch, De Jaager: fixer, go-between, and confidante of the assassin named Louis. The men responsible for the murders are Serbian war criminals. They believe they can escape retribution by retreating to their homeland.
They are wrong.

For Louis has come to Europe to hunt them down: five killers to be found and punished before they can vanish into the east.
There is only one problem.
The sixth.

The Dirty South

It is 1997, and someone is slaughtering young black women in Burdon County, Arkansas.

But no one wants to admit it, not in the Dirty South.

In an Arkansas jail cell sits a former NYPD detective, stricken by grief. He is mourning the death of his wife and child, and searching in vain for their killer. He cares only for his own lost family.

But that is about to change . . .

Witness the becoming of Charlie Parker.

A Book of Bones

The new thrilling instalment of John Connolly's popular Charlie Parker series, out in the UK 18 April.

He is our best hope.

He is our last hope.

On a lonely moor in the northeast of England, the body of a young woman is discovered near the site of a vanished church. In the south, a girl lies buried beneath a Saxon mound. To the southeast, the ruins of a priory hide a human skull.

Each is a sacrifice, a summons.

And something in the shadows has heard the call.

But another is coming: Parker the hunter, the avenger. Parker's mission takes him from Maine to the deserts of the Mexican border; from the canals of Amsterdam to the streets of London - he will track those who would cast this world into darkness.

Parker fears no evil.

But evil fears him . . .

The Woman in the Woods

It is spring, and the semi-preserved body of a young Jewish woman is discovered buried in the Maine woods. It is clear that she gave birth shortly before her death.

But there is no sign of a baby.

Private detective Charlie Parker is engaged by the lawyer Moxie Castin to shadow the police investigation and find the infant, but Parker is not the only searcher. Someone else is following the trail left by the woman, someone with an interest in more than a missing child, someone prepared to leave bodies in his wake.

And in a house by the woods, a toy telephone begins to ring.

For a young boy is about to receive a call from a dead woman . . .

he

An extraordinary reimagining of the life of one of the greatest screen comedians the world has ever known: a man who knew both adoration and humiliation; who loved, and was loved in turn; who betrayed, and was betrayed; who never sought to cause pain to others, yet left a trail of affairs and broken marriages in his wake . . .

And whose life was ultimately defined by one relationship of such tenderness and devotion that only death could sever it: his partnership with the man he knew as Babe.

he is Stan Laurel.
But he did not really exist. Stan Laurel was a fiction.

With he, John Connolly recreates the golden age of Hollywood for an intensely compassionate study of the tension between commercial demands and artistic integrity, the human frailties behind even the greatest of artists, and one of the most enduring and beloved partnerships in cinema history: Laurel & Hardy.

A Game of Ghosts

It is deep winter. Charlie Parker is dispatched to find private detective Jaycob Eklund who has vanished. Parker’s
employer, Edgar Ross, an FBI agent, has his own reasons for wanting Eklund found.

No ordinary investigator, Eklund is obsessively tracking a series of homicides and disappearances, each linked to reports of hauntings.

Now Parker will be drawn into Eklund’s world, a realm in which the monstrous Mother rules a crumbling criminal empire, in which men strike bargains with angels, and in which the innocent and guilty alike are pawns in a game of ghosts...

A Time of Torment

Jerome Burnel was once a hero. He intervened to prevent multiple killings and in doing so damned himself. His life was torn apart. He was imprisoned, brutalized.

But in his final days, with the hunters circling, he tells his story to private detective Charlie Parker. He speaks of the girl who was marked for death but was saved, of the ones who tormented him, and an entity that hides in a ruined stockade.

Parker is not like other men. He died, and was reborn. He is ready to wage war.

Now he will descend upon a strange, isolated community called the Cut, and face down a force of men who rule by terror, intimidation, and murder.

All in the name of the being they serve.

All in the name of the Dead King.

Nocturnes 2: Night Music

Fans of THE BOOK OF LOST THINGS and NOCTURNES will be delighted with this superbly crafted collection of short stories of the supernatural from John Connolly.

A decade after NOCTURNES first terrified and delighted readers, John Connolly, bestselling author of thirteen acclaimed thrillers featuring private investigator Charlie Parker, gives us a second volume of tales of the supernatural. From stories of the monstrous for dark winter nights to fables of fantastic libraries and haunted books, from a tender narrative of love after death to a frank, personal and revealing account of the author's affection for myths of ghosts and demons, this is a collection that will surprise, delight - and terrify.

NIGHT MUSIC also contains two novellas: the multi-award-winning THE CAXTON PRIVATE LENDING LIBRARY & BOOK DEPOSITORY, and THE FRACTURED ATLAS, featuring The Wanderer in Unknown Realms, previously published as an ebook, developed here into a five-part novella.

NIGHT MUSIC: NOCTURNES 2 is a masterly collection to be read with the lights on - menace has never been so seductive.

A Song of Shadows

Grievously wounded private detective Charlie Parker investigates a case that has its origins in a Nazi concentration camp during the Second World War.

Broken, but undeterred, private detective Charlie Parker faces the darkest of dark forces in a case with its roots in the second world war, and a concentration camp unlike any other . . .

Recovering from a near-fatal shooting and tormented by memories of a world beyond this one, Parker has retreated to the small Maine town of Boreas to recover. There he befriends a widow named Ruth Winter and her young daughter, Amanda. But Ruth has her secrets. She is hiding from the past, and the forces that threaten her have their origins in the Second World War, in a town called Lubko and a concentration camp unlike any other. Old atrocities are about to be unearthed, and old sinners will kill to hide their sins. Now Parker is about to risk his life to defend a woman he barely knows, one who fears him almost as much as she fears those who are coming for her.

His enemies believe him to be vulnerable. Fearful. Solitary.

But they are wrong. Parker is far from afraid, and far from alone.

For something is emerging from the shadows...

The Wolf in Winter

Prosperous, a small town in the depths of Maine, shuns outsiders. It guards its own.

The community of Prosperous, Maine, has always thrived when others have suffered. Its inhabitants are wealthy, its children’s future secure. It keeps outsiders out. And its secrets in. At the heart of the town lie the ruins of an ancient church, transported stone by stone from England centuries earlier by the founders.

But the death of a homeless man and the disappearance of his daughter draw the haunted, lethal, private investigator, Charlie Parker to Prosperous. Parker is a dangerous man, driven by compassion, rage, and the desire for vengeance. The town, and its protectors sense a threat graver than any they have faced in their long history. And in the comfortable, sheltered inhabitants of a small Maine community, Parker will encounter his most vicious
enemies yet.

Charlie Parker has been marked to die so that Prosperous may survive. Prosperous, and the secret that it hides beneath its ruins…
 

The Caxton Private Lending Library and Book Depository

2013 Edgar® award winner for Best Short Story (also published as The Museum of Literary Souls)

Mr. Berger spent 34 years as a closed accounts registrar, keeping his life as quiet and empty as possible. He prefers the company of books to that of people, and when the opportunity for early retirement presents itself, he is happy to spend the rest of his years in the countryside, with only books for company.

Mr. Berger’s quiet life is interrupted one evening when he sees a woman fling herself before a train, in the manner of Anna Karenina. When he rushes to help, however, the woman is gone—and thus Mr. Berger is even more shocked when he sees the same woman do exactly the same thing again, a few nights later.

His investigation leads him to the Caxton Private Lending Library and Book Depository, a place beyond all his imaginings.

The Wanderer in Unknown Realms

A digital only short story from John Connolly, The Sunday Times bestselling author of the Charlie Parker novels.

Lionel Maulding, a rare-book collector, has gone missing from his country home in Norfolk. When his nephew approaches Mr Maulding's solicitor, Mr Quayle, to look into the matter, the investigation is passed on to Soter, a WWI veteran, who has done similar detective work for Quayle.

From the nature of books in Lionel Maulding's impressive library at Bromdum Hall, it is clear that he was greatly interested in the occult. But how far did that take him? There is evidence of the withdrawal of £10,000, an extraordinary sum of money for the purchase of a single book.

As Soter delves deeper into the connection between Lionel Maulding's disappearance and the possible existence of the rare book Atlas of Unknown Realms, he starts to question his own sanity. Did Lionel Maulding release evil into the world, or is Soter suffering from post traumatic stress?

As we follow Soter from the slowly decaying Bromdum Hall to the sinister bookseller in Chelsea and the book scout in Whitechapel, we enter his nightmare world where his horrific experiences in the trenches echo the fearful reality unleashed by his search.
 

Books To Die For

In the most ambitious anthology of its kind yet attempted, the world's leading mystery writers have come together to champion the greatest mystery novels ever written.

In a series of personal essays that often reveal as much about themselves and their work work as they do about the books that they love, more than 120 authors from twenty countries have created a guide that will be indispensable for generations of readers and writers. From Christie to Child and Poe to PD James, from Sherlock Holmes to Hannibal Lecter and Philip Marlowe to Peter Wimsey, BOOKS TO DIE FOR brings together the cream of the mystery world for a feast of reading pleasure, a treasure trove for those new to the genre and those who believe that there is nothing new left to discover. This is the one essential book for every reader who has ever finished a mystery novel and thought . . . I want more!

The Wrath Of Angels

In the depths of the Maine woods, the wreckage of an aeroplane is discovered. There are no bodies, and no such plane has ever been reported missing, but men both good and evil have been seeking it for a long, long time. What the wreckage conceals is more important than money: it is power. Hidden in the plane is a list of names, a record of those who have struck a deal with the Devil. Now a battle is about to commence between those who want the list to remain secret and those who believe that it represents a crucial weapon in the struggle against the forces of darkness.

The race to secure the prize draws in private detective Charlie Parker, a man who knows more than most about the nature of the terrible evil that seeks to impose itself on the world, and who fears that his own name may be on the list. It lures others too: a beautiful, scarred woman with a taste for killing; a silent child who remembers his own death; and the serial killer known as the Collector, who sees in the list new lambs for his slaughter.

But as the rival forces descend upon this northern state, the woods prepare to meet them, for the forest depths hide other secrets.

The Burning Soul

Randall Haight has a secret: when he was a teenager, he and his friend killed a 14-year-old girl.

Randall did his time and built a new life in the small Maine town of Pastor's Bay, but somebody has discovered the truth about Randall. He is being tormented by anonymous messages, haunting reminders of his past crime, and he wants private detective Charlie Parker to make it stop.

But another 14-year-old girl has gone missing, this time from Pastor's Bay, and the missing girl's family has its own secrets to protect. Now Parker must unravel a web of deceit involving the police, the FBI, a doomed mobster named Tommy Morris, and Randall Haight himself.

Because Randall Haight is telling lies . . .

The Whisperers

Charlie Parker returns in the chilling new thriller from the Sunday Times bestselling author of THE LOVERS.

The border between Maine and Canada is porous. Anything can be smuggled across it: drugs, cash, weapons, people.

Now a group of disenchanted former soldiers has begun its own smuggling operation, and what is being moved is infinitely stranger and more terrifying than anyone can imagine. Anyone, that is, except private detective Charlie Parker, who has his own intimate knowledge of the darkness in men's hearts.

But the soldiers' actions have attracted the attention of the reclusive Herod, a man with a taste for the strange. And where Herod goes, so too does the shadowy figure that he calls the Captain. To defeat them, Parker must form an uneasy alliance with a man he fears more than any other, the killer known as the Collector . . .

The Lovers

When Charlie Parker was still a boy, his father, a NYPD cop, killed a young couple, a boy and a girl barely older than his son, then took his own life. There was no explanation for his actions.

Stripped of his private investigator's license, and watched by the police, Parker is working in a Portland bar, holding down a job and staying out of trouble. But in the background, he is working on his most personal case yet, an investigation into his own origins and the circumstances surrounding the death of his father, Will.

It is an investigation that will reveal a life haunted by lies, by his mother's loss and his father's betrayal, by secrets kept and loyalties compromised.

And by two figures in the shadows, a man and a woman, with only one purpose: to bring an end to Charlie Parker's existence...

The Reapers

***Straight into the Irish Bestseller Lists at No2 in its first week***

They are the Reapers, the elite among killers. Men so terrifying that their names are mentioned only in whispers. The assassin Louis is one of them. But now Louis, and his partner, Angel, are themselves targets. And there is no shortage of suspects. A wealthy recluse sends them north to a town that no longer exists on a map. A town ruled by a man with very personal reasons for wanting Louis's blood spilt. There they find themselves trapped, isolated, and at the mercy of a killer feared above all others: the assassin of assassins, Bliss. Thanks to former detective Charlie Parker, help is on its way. But can Angel and Louis stay alive long enough for it to reach them?

The Unquiet

*** THE IRISH TIMES NO. 1 BESTSELLER AND SUNDAY TIMES TOP FIVE BESTSELLER***

Parker: “What makes you think I’m going to get in trouble?”

Aimee (the lawyer): “You’re a repeat offender Mr Parker... Trouble is your thing.”

Daniel Clay, a once-respected psychologist, has been missing for years following revelations about harm done to the children in his care. Believing him dead, his daughter Rebecca has tried to come to terms with her father's legacy, but her fragile peace is about to be shattered.

Someone is asking questions about Daniel Clay, someone who does not believe that he is dead: the revenger Merrick, a father and a killer obsessed with discovering the truth about his own daughter's disappearance. Private detective Charlie Parker is hired to make Merrick go away, but Merrick will not be stopped. Soon Parker finds himself trapped between those who want the truth about Daniel Clay to be revealed, and those who want it to remain hidden at all costs.

But there are other forces at work here. Someone is funding Merrick's hunt, a ghost from Parker's past. And Merrick's actions have drawn others from the shadows, half-glimpsed figures intent upon their own form of revenge, pale wraiths drifting through the ranks of the unquiet dead. The Hollow Men have come ...

The Black Angel

THE NEW CHARLIE PARKER THRILLER

*** THE IRISH TIMES NO. 1 BESTSELLER***

**THE SUNDAY TIMES TOP 5 BESTSELLER**

The Black Angel is not an object. The Black Angel is not a myth. The Black Angel lives…

A young woman goes missing from the streets of New York. Those who have taken her believe that nobody cares about her and that no one will come looking for her. They are wrong.

She is “blood” to the killer Louis, the man who stands at the right hand of private detective Charlie Parker and Louis will tear apart anyone who stands in the way of his attempts to find her. But as Louis’ violent search progresses, Parker comes to realize that the disappearance is part of an older mystery, one that is linked to an ornate church of bones in Eastern Europe, to the slaughter at a French monastery in 1944 and to the quest for a mythical prize that has been sought for centuries by evil men: the Black Angel.

Yet the Black Angel is more than a myth. It lives. And men are not the only creatures that seek it.

Nocturnes

***A COLLECTION OF SHORT STORIES FROM THE MASTER OF CHILL***

“Connolly creates those rarest of books – literate and beautifully written page-turners.” Mark Billingham, Daily Mail.

Take his hand and follow him into the darkness…

John Connolly here turns his pen to the short story to give us more than a dozen chilling tales of the supernatural. In this macabre collection, echoing masters of the genre from M.R. James to Stephen King, Connolly delves into our darkest fears – lost lovers, missing children, subterranean creatures and predatory demons.

Framing the collection are two substantial novellas: The Cancer Cowboy Rides charts the fatal progress of a modern-day grim reaper while The Reflecting Eye is a haunted house tale with a twist and marks the return of private detective Charlie Parker, the troubled hero of Connolly’s crime novels.

Nocturnes is a masterly volume to be read with the lights on – menace has never been so seductive

Bad Men

*** A UK SUNDAY TIMES TOP FIVE BESTSELLER ***AN IRISH TIMES NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER ***

*** AN AUSTRALIAN TOP 10 BESTSELLER ***

In 1702, the settlers on the small Maine island of Sanctuary were betrayed to their enemies and slaughtered. Since then, the island has known three hundred years of peace.

Until now. For men are descending on Sanctuary, their purpose to hunt down and kill the wife of their leader and retrieve the money that she stole from him. All that stands in their way are a young rookie officer, Sharon Macy, and the island’s strange, troubled policeman, the giant known as Melancholy Joe Dupree.

But Joe Dupree is no ordinary policeman. He is the guardian of the island’s secrets, the repository of its memories. He knows that Sanctuary has been steeped in blood once; it will tolerate the shedding of innocent blood no longer. Now a band of killers is set to desecrate Sanctuary and unleash the fury of its ghosts upon themselves and all who stand by them.

On Sanctuary, all hell is about to break loose…

This book eats away at your soul. Sunday Business Post

With Bad Men there's no chance of indifference. This is horror that will knock your socks off. Daily Mirror

The White Road

*** A NUMBER 1 IRISH TIMES BESTSELLER ***

*** A UK SUNDAY TIMES TOP TEN BESTSELLER ***

***A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER***

In South Carolina, a young black man faces the death penalty for the rape and murder of Marianne Larousse, daughter of one of the wealthiest men in the state. It's a case that nobody wants to touch, a case with its roots in old evil, and old evil is private detective Charlie Parker's speciality.

But Parker is about to enter a living nightmare, a red dreamscape haunted by the murderous spectre of a hooded woman, by a black car waiting for a passenger that never comes, and by the complicity of both friends and enemies in the events surrounding Marianne Larousse's death.

This is no ordinary investigation. This is a descent into the abyss, a confrontation with dark forces that threaten all that Parker holds dear: his lover, his unborn child, his very soul...

“A brilliantly terrifying ride” Irish Times

The Killing Kind

***A UK SUNDAY TIMES TOP FIVE BEST-SELLER ***

*** AN IRISH TIMES NUMBER ONE BEST-SELLER ***

*** A SYDNEY MORNING HERALD BEST-SELLER ***

JOHN CONNOLLY AT HIS VERY BEST – AS POWERFUL, DISTURBING AND COMPELLING AS THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS

Nobody wants to believe that Grace Peltier committed suicide: not Curtis, her father; not former state senator Jack Mercier; and not private detective Charlie Parker, who has been hired to investigate the circumstances of her death.

But when a mass grave in northern Maine reveals the final resting place of the Aroostock Baptists, a religious community that disappeared almost forty years earlier, Parker realises 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 organisation known as the Fellowship.

“Menace has never been so seductive” Maxim Jakubowski, The Guardian

Dark Hollow

***IN EVERY DEAD THING JOHN CONNOLLY SET NEW STANDARDS FOR THE GENRE***

***IN DARK HOLLOW, CONNOLLY TRIUMPHANTLY JUSTIFIES THE PROMISE OF HIS DEBUT***

*** A UK SUNDAY TIMES TOP FIVE BEST-SELLER ***
*** A NUMBER 1 IRISH TIMES BEST-SELLER ***

SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOUCHERCON BARRY AWARD FOR BEST BRITISH NOVEL

A young woman, Rita Ferris, and her little son die at the hands of an unknown killer, and the past and present collide for Bird Parker.

Still raw from the brutal slayings of his wife and daughter, and the events surround the hunt for their killer, Bird has retreated to the wintry Maine landscapes of his youth. But his return awakens the ghosts of the past, forcing him to join the hunt for Billy Perdue, Rita’s ex-husband and the chief suspect in the slayings.

It becomes clear that someone else is also hunting for Billy Perdue, someone who seems to know Bird almost as well as he knows himself, and that the true answer to the puzzle lies thirty years in the past in the troubled history of Bird’s own grandfather and in the origins of a mythical killer, the monster known as Caleb Kyle.

“Connolly is a master storyteller” The Express

Every Dead Thing

****WINNER OF THE SHAMUS AWARD ***

*** A UK SUNDAY TIMES BEST-SELLER ***AN IRISH TIMES BEST-SELLER ***A SYDNEY MORNING HERALD BEST-SELLER ***

***UK RIGHTS SOLD TO HODDER & STOUGHTON FOR THE BIGGEST AUCTION FOR A FIRST NOVEL SINCE THE HORSE WHISPERER ***

Haunted by the unsolved slayings of his wife and daughter and tormented by his sense of guilt, former New York City detective Charlie 'Bird' Parker is a man consumed by violence, regret and the desire for revenge.

Then Bird's ex-partner asks him to track down a missing girl and Bird embarks on an odyssey that is to lead him into the bowels of organised crime; to an old black woman who lives by the Louisiana swamps; to cellars of torture and death; and to a serial killer unlike any other who uses the human body as his own canvas and takes faces as his prize; a killer known only as The Travelling Man.

Steeped in the best tradition of American crime fiction, John Connolly's stunning first novel pushes back the frontiers of the genre. Complexly plotted, richly textured with memorable characters and a profoundly moral dimension, it is an ambitious debut, triumphantly realised.

This is an ambitious, moral, disturbing tale with a stunning climax The Times