In Irish crime author John Connolly’s latest installment in the Charlie Parker series, there’s blood on the tracks – as well as the walls, windows, tables and pretty much every other available surface. Even by the punishing standards of crime fiction, Connolly favours some especially gruesome methods of despatching his characters, as anyone who has read his brilliantly gripping 1999 debut Every Dead Thing can attest.
It’s very much a case of watching the detectives in Parker’s latest outing, as the character attempts to solve the disappearance of a fellow investigator, Jaycob Eklund. He soon finds himself embroiled in a case Eklund was working on, in which a woman was apparently killed by a murky community called the Brethren.
A writer somewhat ahead of his time, Connolly was doing supernatural-tinged crime fiction a long time before True Detective, and A Game Of Ghosts is another vintage exercise in horror noir. Written in an eerily atmospheric third person style reminscent of Thomas Harris, this novel is a black beauty – and another triumph for one of Ireland’s most talented contemporary writers.