Once upon a time....in the Northern woods of Maine USA..."In April, 1963, a group of four families left their homes on the eastern seaboard and journeyed north...for two hundred miles... to an area of land close by the town of Eagle Lake, twenty miles south of the border between New Brunswick and Maine. ...The Aroostock Baptists arrived in Eagle Lake on April 15, 1963. By January 1964, the settlement had been abandoned. No trace of the founding families...was ever found again."So writes Grace Peltier in her postgraduate thesis some 37 years later. The thesis is never published: Grace Peltier is found dead in her car. Her father's ex-business partner, a former U. S. Senator ("who came from money so old that some of it jangled on the Mayflower"}, hires local private investigator Charlie "Bird" Parker to investigate the death.A few days later Charlie Parker watches on television a crime scene developing at St Froid Lake, a cold body of water in Northern Maine. A river bank has collapsed uncovering multiple human remains. A wooden identifying board is found around the neck of each victim.Charlie Parker is the creation of one John Connolly, Irish storyteller who lives in Dublin most of the year. At the time of this tale, the third of the series, Parker resides in his late grandfather's house south of Portland in Scarborough, Maine, where he grew up as a boy. He's an ex-NYPD detective turned disgraced P. I. haunted by the death of his wife and daughter by a serial killer. He drives a 1969 Boss 302 Mustang with spoilers and wings.You are going to love the world of Charlie Parker. His friends will become your friends. Angel and Louis, a duo of gay semi-retired criminals who share a delight in mayhem and occasional violence. Rachel Wolfe, criminal psychologist and profiler, who lives in Boston doing research and tutorial work at Harvard.Parker, in this novel, has a few shady friends, too. A New York mobster who is slain while attending the opening night of the Boston Ballet's "Cleopatra." An illegal gun dealer found impaled on the main branch of an espaliered pear tree at the Cloisters. And a slim red-haired arachnidologist dressed in brown called Mr. Pudd who is no friend.You'll visit with Parker his favorite haunts in the northeastern part of America. The Orensanz Center in the Lower East Side of New York City. The Wang Center in Boston. The Strand Book Store on Broadway. The Portland Public Market. Chumley's Bar in the Village.THE KILLING KIND is my first Connolly read. It won't be my last!
The disappearance of a religious community in Maine had long since been the subject of controversy. It wasn’t until recently that the discovery of a mass grave containing those that had vanished all those years ago that the state began to get some answers. Shortly after it’s discovery, Detective Charlie Parker reluctantly becomes involved in the search for those responsible for the slaughter. Can Charlie uncover the truth behind the murders or will his connection with the afterlife ultimately lead to his downfall?With Every Dead Thing and Dark Hollow, Connolly spends a great deal of time getting to know Parker while also establishing a world in which his characters can live and breathe. However, with Killing Kind, Connolly takes the characters into as dark a direction as he can. Playing up the supernatural aspects that lingered in the first two books, Connolly puts it on front street for the reader to experience.Basically, what Connolly does is infuses those supernatural elements from the first two novels and turns the volume up to eleven. In saying that, I’m not trying to convey that the story takes a turn in a direction that requires a certain level of disbelief. Connolly very much keeps the core story in the "real world". The characters develop in a natural way and you’re not left wondering what kind of world he’s trying to craft. It’s a certain uniqueness that sets it apart from your standard procedural detective novel.Parkers main adversary this time around, Mr. Pudd is excellently well developed. He’s truly a terrifying enemy and has some excellent scenes. Using recluse spiders as a means to kill his victims, I can confidently tell you that my skin was crawling on more than a few occasions. His relationship with his girlfriend, Rachel, begins to feel the strain of his job as well as his growing connection with the spirit of his first wife and daughter. Connolly begins establishing that Parker’s life will never really be what he wants it to be.It’s essential that you read this book before picking up the follow up, The White Road. Aside from The Reapers (the seventh book in the Parker saga), The Killing Kind and The White Road are his best work. Outside of where we find Parker in the outset of Every Dead Thing, Killing Kind and The White Road take Parker to his absolute limit so we truly get to understand what a gripping character he is.
What do You think about The Killing Kind (2003)?
I am "in love" with Mr Connelly's writing. "This is a Honeycomb World. It hides a hollow heart." This novel, the third in the Charlie Parker series was frightening and scary as the spiders who kept on invading the story. This is the stuff of nightmares especially for those of us who fear those eight legged creatures and things that crawl along the ground, humans included.In this story, Mr Parker goes up against a religious cult and the leaders of the cult are enough to make one rethink their concept of evil. Charlie is aided by his friends, the most engaging and interesting Louis and Angel who successfully bring this book to its inevitable conclusion. Rachel, Charlie's love interest, becomes more of a fixture in Charlie's life and I find with the conclusion of this book, I am ever so anxious to begin the next in the series.I have never been much of a mystery reader, but I feel that before I had never read an author so very talented in bring ing out the macabre, the sinister, and the evil that can exist in the world. "For in total blackness, time has no meaning."
—Marialyce
Another good thriller featuring Charlie "Bird" Parker, Connolly's former NYPD officer turned private detective. Forty years after they disappeared, members of a fringe religious cult are discovered, buried in a river bank in back woods Maine. At the same time Parker is hired to investigate the supposed suicide of a graduate student who was investigating the same group. Are these events related? (Of course!)I'm a sucker for books involving religious cults so I found this one particularly entertaining. I was somewhat disappointed by the villains Connolly created for the story. I had a hard time believing that Parker and his criminal sidekicks Angel and Louis could find them such challenging adversaries. With each book Connolly has increased the paranormal touches that make this series unique. While they do not help Parker in the resolution of his cases, they do seem to provide him with motivation to keep pursuing the cases. I get the sense that the deaths of his wife and daughter in the first book have created in Parker a psychic link with the dead. I like it.
—Tom Mathews
Don't read "The Killing Kind" if you have an aversion to spiders. Seriously. This book will make you itch and squirm and just plain freak out with the thought of eight-legged killers crawling all over you. John Connolly's third novel to feature his private eye, Charlie Parker, also introduces us to one of the most loathsome and creepy serial killers I have ever encountered, Mr. Pudd. Mr. Pudd loves spiders, especially black widows and brown recluses, both of which happen to be highly poisonous. He likes to put them in places that they shouldn't go, such as mailboxes, car glove compartments, or people's mouths... 'Nuff said. Parker is hired by a wealthy businessman to investigate the murder of a young girl named Grace, a college student who was investigating the disappearance of the Aroostock Baptists. The Aroostock Baptists were a group of families that followed the religious teachings of a man named Faulkner. In the 1970s, the entire group disappeared somewhere in the forests of Maine. Most believed that the group simply disbanded and went their separate ways, but when a highway construction team accidentally digs up a mass grave in northern Maine, thoughts of what happened to the Aroostock Baptists suddenly turn grim. Forensic evidence discovers that the victims had been tortured and killed. All of the bodies are accounted for, except for one: Faulkner's. As always, Connolly concocts a suspenseful murder mystery that twists and turns in unexpected directions. As stated before, the creepiness factor is amped up, as well. I have officially become a voracious Connolly fan, eager to read the next one in the series.
—Scott Rhee
