A Song of Shadows

July 27, 2015
In Connolly’s gripping 13th Charlie Parker thriller (after 2014’s The Wolf in Winter), the normally peaceful town of Boreas, Maine, where the PI has retreated, is suddenly hit with several murders in rapid succession. First, four members of a family—the parents and two teenage daughters—are shot dead in their house. Then a body washes ashore not far from the home of Ruth Winter, a single mother with a daughter who’s nine, about the same age as Charlie’s. While visiting Ruth, Charlie notices that she has removed the mezuzah from her front door, is unusually apprehensive about something, and refuses, despite Charlie’s urging, to reveal what she knows about the drowned man found on the beach. Cory Bloom, Boreas’s chief of police, and Gordon Walsh, a Maine State Police detective, feed Charlie information as he doggedly pursues the killer, in the process offering himself as bait. The fast-paced action builds to a shocking ending. Agent: Darley Anderson, Darley Anderson Literary.

Starred review from August 1, 2015
Recovering from a murderous attack that left him for deadclinically he died and was resuscitated three times PI Charlie Parker relocates from his shattered home to Boreas, a small coastal town in northern Maine. The pain of physical therapy is unrelenting, but Charlie keeps lengthening his daily walks on the beach, sensing that some new evil will find him, even in sleepy Boreas. His instincts prove accurate, and soon he's neck deep in aged Nazis who were cogs in the Final Solution, determined professional killers who can't resist some gratuitous torture before fulfilling a contract, and dead innocents. Will Charlie be able to defeat this new evil? Connolly's brand of crime always features a struggle of Good vs. Evil, with a dash of the paranormal thrown in, along with criminals of preternatural malevolence. In this one, the paranormal element is Charlie's growing certainty that his six-year-old daughter has willed the death of one of the most depraved killers who ever trained a gun on Charlie. Another feature of the series is prose that is often lyrical but never less than compelling. Although Connolly has won just about every award for crime fiction, he doesn't seem to have the U.S. following that his gifts warrant. Perhaps A Song of Shadows will bring him that audience.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)

March 15, 2015

Convalescing in a small Maine town, a weary Charlie Parker befriends the widowed Ruth Winter and soon finds himself risking his life to defend her against some very insistent stalkers. It seems that Ruth has secrets going all the way back to a Nazi concentration camp. Next in the popular series after The Wolf in Winter.

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