John Parker is a Graduate-qualified English/Spanish Teacher, owner and director of CHAT ENGLISH, an English Language Centre in Avilés on the north coast of Spain . A voracious reader, he has particularly loved horror fiction for many years.
Charlie Parker fans have had to be patient as John Connolly “skipped” a year publishing the sequel to The Book of Lost Things [entitled The Land of Lost Things] instead.
Our haunted detective’s return commences with a woman - Colleen Clark accused of the abduction (and possible murder) of her only child, Henry. While the media, the general public and various politicians (motivated by ambition in an election season) believe she is guilty and are ready to burn her at the stake. However, a few individuals appear willing to defend her and give her a fair trial.
Enter long-time supporting character lawyer Moxie Castin who engages the services of our Shamus, Charlie Parker in helping him defend his client, Colleen Clark. It appears that the accused sought Moxie as her advocate because she knew he’d be able to get Charlie Parker to assist.
Parker soon discovers that all is not as it seems. Colleen’s husband Stephen had had an affair with a woman named Mara Teller some time before the abduction. Nobody can track Teller down as she seems to have disappeared from the face of the earth. Could she have anything to do with the kidnapping?
Elsewhere, in the Maine woods, there lies a property that was built from a Sears Kit (No. 174) in the year 1912. A house which the local people avoid, a place where [allegedly] something unnatural lurks, something quite terrible. As an interesting aside, Connolly later mentions a true story of the Khmer Rouge and School S-21, where people in Cambodia were tortured and mutilated (the number desensitizing and dehumanizing the place).
Then there’s the psychic Sabine Drew who has been drawn to Maine via the cries of a little boy lost. Drew realizes she has no choice but to go to Maine and seek out Parker, despite something terrible that happened to her in the past, something devastating that occurred not long after she had experienced her greatest triumph.
The Parker supporting cast return in The Instruments of Darkness including Louis and Angel, the Fulci brothers, a surprise return of Sharon Macy from Connolly’s standalone novel Bad Men (in which Charlie Parker has a fleeting cameo) and even a glimpse into Charlie’s distant past.
The novel is structured as a standalone not requiring any understanding [or memory] of backstory, despite the subtle links to previous novels such as The Wolf in Winter, A Book of Bones and The Woman in the Woods. Coupled with judicious editing, it propels the narrative with significant velocity.
The author’s interest in folk horror and the theme of psychogeography is vividly realized, where the ‘past’ striates the landscapes of the ‘present’.
The Instruments of Darkness is an adroitly plotted mystery-thriller novel full of intrigue, anguish-inducing horror and explosive action. Connolly [as ever] sprinkles gallows humour throughout - leading up to a killer dénouement, making this latest entry in the Charlie Parker series extraordinary.
