Dark Hollow (Hardcover)

In this particular story, Parker has moved to his ancestral Maine to live, trying to get away from the city. He's asked by a friend to find her ex-husband, and see if he will cough up some child support, but the money that the ex gives Parker turns out to be connected to a bizarre three-way shootout on a nearby beach that happened a few days before. Someone wound up with two million dollars that the mob thinks is theirs, and they're not going to stop looking for it. Meanwhile, the ex-wife and her toddler son are killed in a bizarre fashion, a pair of crazed hit men show up bent on some strange sort of revenge against Parker, and in the background somewhere there's a ghost from the past, a killer half-spoken of, half unseen for more than thirty years. Add to this mix Parker's two friends, ex-burglar Angel and his gay lover semi-retired hitman Louis, and an old girlfriend of Bird's, and that's just the beginning of the book.

Connolly apparently has this as a pattern or style now. These books have murky, dark plots, laden with atmosphere. I think he could make Hawaii look dark and forbidding if he wrote something set there. There's connections to crimes past, interesting characters intermingled in a bewilderingly complex plot, snappy dialog, and a body count that makes the Battle of Stalingrad look like a tea party. I enjoy this sort of thing, and enjoyed this book a great deal. Be warned though: enter at your own risk.

But as we learn after a few dozen pages, Charlie, an alchohlic who gives up the bottle, also gives up any moral restraint against the concept of killing criminals. He becomes overnight a one man angel of death with no desire to curb his bloodlust when faced with the possibility that a murderer or rapist could possibly be freed by a confusing, liberal, system that favors the rights of the accused over the rights of the victem.

While this sounds like poor pulp fiction, several things occur that Mr. Connolly successfully weaves into the fabric of his prose to make it quite engaging. First of all, Connolly writes extremely well. There is an almost musical quality to his prose, heretofore only experienced (for this reader) with James Lee Burke in this type of novel. Additionally, Mr. Connolly introduces some oddities that seem to fit. Charlie is contacted by the dead, and while the body count rises, he seems to regret what he does while on the same hand he seems to listen to what his deceased wife and daughter tell him. That line from a Bruce Willis movie a few years ago comes true here: He sees dead people.

Then, there is the presence of his two friends and quasi partners, the gay couple Louis and Angel. Strange, but it fits.

Here he works as a private investigator working for a woman stalked by her ex-husband. The woman and her son are murdered, the ex-husband is suspected, and naturally Charlie "Bird" Parker is the only one that doesn't believe it. The mob is involved; a young arrogant mobster is investing money "borrowed" from his colleagues when his "sure fire" investment goes south. Cambodians from the Khmer Rouge make a brief appearance; an ex-lover pops up; a halting attempt that Charlie might make amends to the lovely Rachel, a criminologist/psychologist/forensic scientist; and certainly not last nor least, Louis and Angel.

Not for the squeamish. Lots of violence. Very well written.

Larry Scantlebury