A Time of Torment
A Charlie Parker Thriller
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4.4 • 19 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
#1 internationally bestselling author John Connolly delivers a masterful combination of “the hard-boiled with the supernatural” (Publishers Weekly, starred review) with this return of dangerous and driven private investigator Charlie Parker as he battles an old evil that haunts a strange and isolated community.
Jerome Burnel was once a hero. He intervened to prevent multiple killings, and in doing so damned himself. His life was torn apart, imprisoned and brutalized.
But in his final days, with the hunters circling, he tells his story to private detective Charlie Parker. He speaks of the girl who was marked for death, but was saved; of the ones who tormented him, and an entity that hides in a ruined stockade.
Parker is not like other men. He died, and was reborn. He is ready to wage war.
Now he will descend upon a strange, isolated community called the Cut, and face down a force of men who rule by terror, intimidation, and murder.
All in the name of the being they serve. All in the name of the Dead King.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
As in the best noir, the violent events that propel the plot of Connolly's grim but compelling 14th novel featuring PI Charlie Parker (after 2015's A Song of Shadows) are triggered by a seemingly innocuous choice. Jerome Burnel, a jewelry store manager, in the middle of an armed robbery at a gas station outside Portland, Maine, manages to kill the criminals and save the intended victims. Two months later, someone frames Burnel by planting child porn in his house. During his subsequent imprisonment, Burnel is violated repeatedly by a sadist who says that he works for an entity known as the Dead King. After Burnel's release, he hires Parker to look into who set him up so he'd go to prison, only to disappear soon afterward, leaving the sleuth another mystery that takes him down some extremely mean streets. Connolly again displays his mastery at combining the hard-boiled with the supernatural. Eloquent prose is a plus ("A man driving on a dark fall evening, a gas station appearing in the distance: to stop or go on. On such decisions were lives saved, lives ended, and lives destroyed").
