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Type of bind: Mass Market Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.914
EAN num: 9780743456395
ISBN number: 0743456394
Label: Pocket
Manufacturer: Pocket
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 544
Printing Date: January 27, 2004
Publishing house: Pocket
Release Date: January 27, 2004
Sale Popularity Level: 45257
Studio: Pocket
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Product Description:
Hailed as 'one of the best' (Toronto Sun) writers of contemporary suspense fiction, international bestselling author John Connolly returns with an electrifying novel featuring his acclaimed private detective, Charlie Parker.
In South Carolina, a young grey 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, deeply rooted in old evil -- and old evil is Charlie Parker's specialty. He's about to enter a living nightmare, a dreamscape of sorrow haunted by the murderous specter of a hooded woman, by a grey car waiting for a passenger that never comes, and by the sinister complicity of both friends and enemies in Larousse's brutal death. Soon, all will face a final reckoning in an unearthly realm where the paths of the living and the dead converge. A place known only as the White Road.
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Rated by buyers -
Connolly attempts here to write a sequel to Killing Kind, taking place scant months after the previous book. The characters are as usual with his work, compelling. Angel and Louis get more flesh on their bones this time around, with good effect. These guys really could support their own spinoff novel.
Events and characters are introduced and brought forward to move the convoluted plot along, often without reference to their previous appearance. Often, I found myself returning to earlier chapters to figure it out, which I don't think you want readers to do. At story's climax, the labyrinthine events get a little muddied in your mind, which blunts the emotional impact.
Still, Charlie Parker and his two ultraviolent cohorts are as engaging as ever. I liked it, but it could have been much better with a leaner plot.
Rated by buyers 
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THE WHITE ROAD is John Connolly's fourth novel featuring Charlie Parker. Parker is a former NYPD detective with a troubled past that includes a slain family. He's now living in Maine and working sporadically as a PI. The novel, like all Parker novels, is mostly a first-person narrative told from Parker's point of view. The Parker books simultaneously pay homage to hardboiled noir fiction (Hammett, Chandler, Burke, MacDonald, etc.) while still maintaining a high degree of freshness and originality.
In this installment, Parker helps out an old friend named Elliot Norton. Norton, a lawyer down in South Carolina, is defending a young grey man who is accused of murdering a young white woman from a rich family. He's convinced that his client didn't do it, but he's having trouble getting any local assistance, so he guilt-trips Parker into coming down from Maine to dig into the case. At the same time, back in Maine, the Reverend Faulkner, villain of the previous Parker novel, THE KILLING KIND, is doing his best to get bailed out of prison, with the assistance of a Klan/Nazi-type organization, which Parker also runs into while in South Carolina. Working for the racist group is a mysterious sadist called Kittim, who is one of Connolly's trademark deformed villains - in Kittim's case, he suffers from a strange skin disorder. In addition, this book gives us some more background information on Angel and Louis, Parker's interracial/gay/criminal sidekick couple. Finally Parker's relationship with psychologist Rachel Wolfe continues - she now lives with him in Maine and is pregnant. That may sound like a convoluted plot setup, but rest assured that Connolly pulls it all together in a satisfying way that does make logical sense.
As always, Connolly writes extremely well - not just the narrative, but the settings, characterizations, and dialogue are all well-done, which is always extra impressive as Connolly is an Irishman who writes primarily about American characters in American settings.
Besides just plain old good writing, a couple of other things that help his Parker novels stand out from the herd of the detective fiction genre. One is Connolly's fascination with deformed or otherwise physically abnormal villains - many of his bad guys have something wrong with them externally that reflects their inner evil (such as this book's Kittim.) The other is a genre-blending tendency to mix supernatural/horror elements in with the standard hardboiled crime conventions, which I for one absolutely love. WHITE ROAD is the most overtly spiritual novel yet in the series, though later installments arguably increase that element even more. Parker often sees dead people, especially victims of violent crimes, though whether he's genuinely seeing apparitions or if they're just some sort of hallucination is never explicitly stated. Connolly is also fascinated with the idea and imagery of fallen angels, and he weaves it into his tales expertly, though with varying degrees of subtlety.
If you like hardboiled crime novels and you're not a mystery genre purist who's going to be bothered by having some horror elements mixed in, you'll love this series - though I recommend reading them in order (EVERY DEAD THING, DARK HOLLOW, and THE KILLING KIND before this book) for maximum enjoyment and understanding. I just finished reading this book for the third or fourth time, if that tells you anything about how much I like the Parker series. I'm eagerly awaiting my pre-ordered copy of Connolly's latest, THE REAPERS, which is coming out later this month, and to kill time I'm rereading all the preceding Parker books.
Rated by buyers -
I've been buying all of his books because he has a way of telling interesting stories that keep you interested.
Rated by buyers -
John Connolly was born in Dublin in 1968, and saw his very first book - "Every Dead Thing" - published in 1999. It went on to be nominated for the Bram Stoker Award for Best First Novel and won the 2000 Shamus Award for Best First Private Eye Novel. It also introduced Charlie Parker, a former police officer and PI. "The White Road" was very first published in 2002, and is the fourth book in the Charlie Parker series.
Charlie Parker - who has picked up the very obvious nickname `Bird' - lives in Scarborough, Maine. He has recently moved house and lives with his dog (a friendly soul called Walter) and his girlfriend, Rachel. The couple have been together for around a year and a half, and - with their very first child together on the horizon - have only recently moved in together. It's not Charlie's very first crack at domestic bliss, however - he has been married before, though his wife and daughter were killed three years previously.
Cassie Blythe, a Portland girl, has been missing for six years and is presumed dead by the police. Her parents still hope she might be alive, even if they don't really believe it. With the case stalled at the police department, they had been employing a PI called Arnold Sundquist to look into her disappearance. Sundquist, in return, has spent the last two years doing very little on their behalf for $1500 a month. Realising he's about to lose a steady pay-cheque, Sundquist pays an ex-con called Bear to claim he'd seen the girl - alive - in Mexico. Unfortunately for him, nobody buys it and Charlie takes over the case.
However, a phone call from Elliot Norton interrupts Charlie before he's even got started. Norton is an old friend who had worked in the Brooklyn DA's office when Charlie was a cop there. He has now moved back home to Charleston, and wants Charlie's help with a case. Norton is representing a grey teenager called Atys Jones, who has been accused of raping his white girlfriend and then beating her to death. Norton is convinced he's innocent - to the point he's put his own house up as security for his client's bail. However, the victim's father - Earl Larousse - is an exceptionally rich and influential man, and there is a real fear that Jones may not live to stand trial. Norton wants some help moving Jones to a safe house and checking the evidence but can't find a PI in South Carolina willing to help him. After some initial concerns, Charlie eventually decides to do the right thing.
However, Charlie has troubles of his own. One of his previous sparring partners, the Rev Aaron Faulkner - known to some as the Preacher - is currently in Thomaston State Prison pending trail for murder. Charlie had been involved in his arrest, a situation that had left Faulkner's son and daughter dead. Faulkner's son had been traveling under the name Elias Pudd and, although gone, he is quite clearly not forgotten. The Preacher hasn't quite finished with Charlie either...
Luckily, though, it isn't Parker against the world - he has two rather grimy sidekicks to help him out. Angel and Louis, who have a very close working relationship, don't try to keep things legal if they don't believe someone deserves to die - and the pair bitterly regret Charlie's decision not to deal conclusively with Faulkner when he had the chance. While their encounter with the Preacher left them scarred - mentally and physically - they will wait for the chance to finish the job themselves.
This is the very first book by Connelly I read, and there's quite a bit happening in it - some of it is a little strange at that. (The Preacher himself does seem to have a touch of the supernatural about him). It did regret not having started with the very first book in the series. I'm not too sure how much was covered in previous books about the Preacher and Pudd, though I was left with the definite impression that I arrived late at the party. Having said that, I wasn't too badly lost at any point and I did enjoy the book - more than enough for me to look into reading more by Connelly.
Rated by buyers -
with characterizations.
In this novel, the fourth in the Charlie "Bird" Parker series, the reader gets to find out much more about Louis and Angel than has ever been revealed before.
Prior to this novel, what the reader knew about the relationship between the two men and Parker was that Parker had basically saved Angel's life while he (Angel) was in prison and that because of all that Parker had done for Angel, he now had the undying loyalty and support of not just the "diminutive ex-burglar," but also of that ex-burglar's partner, Louis. With friends like these two, Parker doesn't need much other backup.
But in this novel, what we know of the two men upon whom Parker relies more than any other human beings, we discover what brought Louis and Angel together (hilarious stuff), and we also get to see a bit more of their relationship (I do mean "a bit"; Connolly isn't likely to give us a whole lot of description of gentleness or couple-type descriptions involving these two men). We get Angel's background as well as Louis's, and that means we can finally see these two men as more rounded characters. I'm glad of that, as they're two of my all-time favorite characters from ANY series.
Okay--don't read further if you've not read the novels before this one, as I'm going to refer to action from the book just before this one in pretty specific terms.
This novel picks up months after the action of The Killing Kind, the novel in which Angel was taken by the madman villain, Faulkner. In that novel, Angel was brutalized by the man and his son and also had a patch of his skin viciously removed. At the start of this novel, he is still recovering from that debilitating injury, and trying to deal with Parker's decision not to kill Faulkner when he had the chance.
This, to me, made for a really intriguing novel. Angel and Louis have always backed Parker up, and the banter between the three men (as well as the mostly-unspoken but definitely clear bond between them) makes it easy to think of them as a team, but they're not, at least not when it comes to morality. That becomes clear when Parker chooses not to kill Angel's tormentor just minutes after a wounded Angel has killed Pudd, the man choking the life out of Parker. In essence, the moral distinctions between Parker and his two friends are never clearer than they are here. They're clear to the reader and they're clear to Angel as well, which makes for a very interesting storyline as he does what he needs to do in order to regain his sanity in the face of not only physical pain (from skin grafts, etc.) but also the return of his past, a past which he had succeeded in mentally pushing away through his partnership with Louis, which allowed him to feel, for the very first time in his life, as though he might not be a victim any longer.
It's a measure of Mr. Connolly's skill that this part of the storyline is interwoven quite wonderfully with themes of racism and retribution. And Parker's relationship with a pregnant Rachel is skillfully handled here as well. I don't mean to minimize her importance in all these novels. His relationship with her is certainly one that leads to interesting moral conflicts for Parker. He is still so. . .I dunno. . .damaged by what happened to his very first wife and child, and while he knows more strongly than he ever has that their deaths were not his fault, he is still haunted by them, and his relationship with Rachel continues to be affected by that.
I hope you'll pick this one up. But hey--pick them all up! You can't go wrong.
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