Every dead thing

I was perusing [a:Adrian McKinty|12433|Adrian McKinty|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1356727379p2/12433.jpg]'s blog, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, and came across his list of favorite books from 2014. McKinty, being one of my favorite authors (and writer of one of my own favorite 2014 books, [b:In the Morning I'll be Gone|17187220|In the Morning I'll be Gone|Adrian McKinty|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1392383531s/17187220.jpg|23637302][2]), is also a book reviewer and has a very intelligent blog, well worth checking out. And in his post of My Favourite Books Of The Year, he has a long list of favorite mystery authors. Many of them aren't available here. Heck, at least one of the authors isn't even listed on Goodreads! But one of them was [a:John Connolly|38951|John Connolly|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1201288913p2/38951.jpg], who in 2014 came with with the twelfth Charlie Parker mystery, [b:The Wolf in Winter|18144171|The Wolf in Winter (Charlie Parker, #12)|John Connolly|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1415006181s/18144171.jpg|25491507]. Being a good mystery reader, I of course had to start with the first one, 1999's [b:Every Dead Thing|175242|Every Dead Thing (Charlie Parker, #1)|John Connolly|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1393929687s/175242.jpg|890720].

As I started reading it, I was struck by the irony of it starting off with the brutal (and I mean Brutal) slayings of his wife and his young daughter, while Parker, a New York City cop, was at the local watering hole, drowning his sorrows in alcohol. He comes back to discover them gruesomely slaughtered and his life, needless to say, goes off the rails. The irony comes from reading McKinty's scathing review of Stephen King's recent private eye novel, [b:Mr. Mercedes|18775247|Mr. Mercedes (Bill Hodges Trilogy, #1)|Stephen King|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1404632076s/18775247.jpg|26680281], where he complains:

Many bad crime novels begin with graphic violence, particularly violence towards children. Bad crime writers fear that unless the stakes are raised sufficiently at the start, their story-telling skills alone won’t be deft enough for potential readers to continue with the book. But if the villain is a depraved monster who does terrible things by, say, page six then the angry reader will be hooked.

And I said, oh oh, that's exactly how this books starts! But reading on, my fears lessened, as there was some pretty slick writing and some pretty funny descriptions. The mystery of his wife and daughter's murder is unsolved, but, after quitting the force, Parker begins looking for some investigative work and gets involved in a missing person, much to his dismay.

But that mystery started to confuse me and soon Parker finds himself in the backwoods of Virginia, battling rednecks and solving another set of gruesome murders and uncovers what seems to be a long cycle of child torture and murder - ugh. And then he comes back to New York City to follow this trail and uncovers more gruesome child murders. Then he ends up in Louisiana, tracking the "Traveling Man", purported serial killer of his family and gets involved in even more gruesome killings.

By then I was just struggling to finish the book. I had about 100 pages left and I just skimmed it to finish it. A bad way to start off the new year, as the book was confusing, meandering, and gruesome in totally unnecessary ways, like saying one of the serial killers used some kind of drug so his victims stayed alive while he flayed them. Double Ugh.

So I don't think I'll move on in this series. Life is too short and there are far too many excellent mysteries (including Mr. McKinty's own peerless Duffy series) to be read to even take a chance on another Parker book.