“Two violent occurrences, taking place almost simultaneously one winter’s night, bound together by a single dark thread that lost itself in tangled memories of distant, brutal acts.” This quote sums up a complicated and gruesome plot. While I have been trying to entertain myself with lighter reads, they weren’t getting the job done. So I made the decision to catch up on one of my favorite dark and brutally violent series instead! As always with this series, the plot is complex, the writing i

In Charlie Parker’s debut, Every Dead Thing, John Connolly introduced a protagonist who had already fallen from grace; a New York City police detective, he was getting drunk in a bar as his wife and young daughter were being brutally murdered. With absolutely no progress made on the case in the months that follow, he falls further, as evidenced in part by his resignation. Only in taking on a different case privately do details emerge that lead to the dead-of-night serial killer that took his fam...

'There are people whose eyes you must avoid, whose attention you must not draw to yourself.' So the second book in the Charlie Parker series, and my reread mission continues. Hired by a woman to get child support from her ex-husband, Charlie joins a lengthy queue of people searching for Billy Purdue and the alleged funds he's suddenly come into. Pretty soon Rita Purdue and her son are dead, there are mobsters, hitmen and all sorts running round being naughty and Charlie has to wade through it

every book starts out as a three-star book for me. I am hopeful but realistic. I treat books like I treat people. am I prepared to "like" - i.e. 3 stars - a person right off the bat? well yeah, why not. but am I prepared to "really like" - 4 stars - a person, automatically? I don't think so, let's get to know each other first.Dark Hollow is a solid 3 star book. I liked it. haunted former police detective Charlie Parker is embroiled in his second crime mystery, this time involving an array of rep...

This was an old evil, and old evil has a way of permeating bloodlines and tainting those who played no part in its genesis: the young, the innocent, the vulnerable, the defenseless. It turns life to death and glass to mirrors, creating an image of itself in everything that it touches.The great Charlie Parker re-read continues with Dark Hollow, and boy but this one was determined to live up to the name. If these earlier books didn't hold such great nostalgia value for me, I'd be sorely tempted to...

I ordered this from the library with ambivalence; though I enjoy Connolly's writing, I didn't find the first book of the Charlie Parker series particularly enjoyable (body count was a little high for me). However, book 8, The Lovers, was engrossing and well done, so I thought it was worth finding out more about Parker's timeline. Also, his Samuel Jackson series is excellent. I found a rather solid mystery-thriller, peppered with the descriptive passages I've come to love.The plot centers around

Dark.To describe a book entitled Dark Hollow by decidedly dark fiction writer John Connolly and starring the most definitely dark protagonist Charlie “Bird” Parker seems a bit redundant, but that’s the feeling left after having read Dark Hollow … that it is dark.Parker is dark because he is still haunted by the brutal slayings of his wife and child, as described in the equally dark first novel in the series, Connolly’s dark 1999 novel Every Dead Thing – which does not contain the word dark, but

Great follow up to Every Dead Thing. These books are dark and complex but are so good it's hard to put them down.

The success of Every Dead Thing appears to have energized John Connolly, because here he writes with a confidence and clarity that other authors take a lifetime to achieve. If ever. A particularly vivid experience, this. You can taste, smell and breathe this book. The opening words, "I dream dark dreams" set the tone of the novel. It is indeed the stuff of dreams. Terrifying dreams.The plot involves the hunt for a serial killer, as with Every Dead Thing's The Traveling Man. You'll have to decide...

A slight adding to my original review from 2012 when I was just discovering the writings of John Connolly and his Charlie Parker series. Having read the whole series by now (with high expectations of the next installments) this rereading which is only interesting in a series of books you are are really invested in them. The second novel written By mr. Connelly in which Louis & Angel play a bigger part and also it seems that organised crime takes a vacation in Maine due to the amount of nearly tw...

WOW!! I have to give this 5 STARS!Thanks Terry and Latasha for a great buddy read and continuing on with this series. I'm so excited to read the next book in this series!Dark Hollow is the 2nd book in the Charlie Parker series and it's much better then the first.Maybe I have an emotional connection to Charlie, Louis and Angel now? That could be one point but I think it's more then that.Dark Hollow takes all the great things from the 1st book, Every Dead Thing and gives it a purpose and direction...

It's hard to describe how much I am enjoying this series. I have had several mediocre to bad reads lately, and these last two books by this author have been a dark, refreshing wind. The main character, Charlie Parker, continues to develop and grow. By beginning with the horror introduced in the first book, the author is able to create psychological parallels and foundations that build both plot platforms interpersonally and through the horrific events that seem to gravitate toward the protagonis...

"In the old house, the past hung in the air like motes of dust waiting to be illuminated by the sharp rays of memory."Charlie Parker, almost a year after the murder of his family, is trying to find peace. He has returned to Maine where he spent his youth and has moved into his Grandfathers old house in Scarborough with the intention of doing it up. Unfortunately he doesn't get very much done as before long he is drawn into the hunt for the killer of another mother and child. The obvious suspect

I don't read many thrillers. In fact, my entire repertoire of thrillers before this book consisted of Silence of the Lambs and the first Charlie Parker. I only read a thriller when the mood strikes me Or when my uncle steals my e-reader, gets me a copy and hits me over the head with the e-reader)He really is that weird.In "Dark Hollow", two seemingly unrelated events that happen in one night pave the road for serial killers, suicides and sickening murders. Ex-detective Charlie Parker takes on a

Video Review: https://youtu.be/kKqXQtaiQdg4.5 stars rounded down because, while I had loads of fun, this isn't Every Dead Thing so it was in trouble from the jump.This book suffers from Secondbookitis. If you're unfamiliar, Secondbookitis is when a sequel doesn't live up to the book that came before it, whether that be an author's unrelated sophomore effort, or like in this case, with a continuation of a series. (E. from the future here: the third book in the series is better than books one and

‘Dark Hollow’ is SO exciting I couldn't stop reading it until I literally couldn’t focus on the page when my body demanded I go to sleep NOW! I cursed my physical weakness…..After my morning coffee (without which the dementia which may attack me at any moment is once again held off), I finished the novel and now I am sated with satisfaction. John Connolly’s writing style reminds me of John Sanford and James Lee Burke; however, since Connolly includes a strong element of supernatural ghost visita...

Superb writing in this character-driven psychological thriller series. Charlie Parker is a man of intense loyalty and passion. In "Dark Hollow," Parker is still processing his grief over the loss of his wife and daughter nearly one year before and trying to make some semblance of a life for himself in the aftermath.One strange death occurs almost simultaneously with a mass killing with marks of the mob clearly associated with it, neither of which have anything to do with Parker or anyone he know...

Dark Hollow is Book 2 of John Connolly's Charlie Parker series. If possible, I enjoyed this one even more so than EVERY DEAD THING. We learn more about Charlie, and watch how he grows from his emotional upstart to a man who just believes that it is his role to protect the innocents around him. This novel seemed to develop in terms of plot even more rapidly that its predecessor, and I loved the return of Charlie's loyal, enigmatic friends Lewis and Angel.Book 3, THE KILLING KIND is rising on my T...

I met Charlie Parker for the first time last year, when I read John Connolly’s first book in the Charlie Parker series, Every Dead Thing. To say I fell in love with him is a mere expression of the tip of an iceberg with regard to my feelings for Charlie Parker; they go definitely deeper than mere love for a fictional character. He is not your usual hero, all swashbuckling and saving damsels in distresses while showing he has no fears or that such events are just a part of his life. Oh no, he is

In the second of Connolly’s 19 Charlie Parker novels, he delivers a thriller set in the wooded expanses of Maine, at the edge of the country, in the far north where there is but a bit or wilderness left. Parker, often called Bird by his buddies such as Louis and Angel, is a former NYPD detective who is wracked with endless guilt for being in a bar when his wife and daughter were butchered. He tracked the killer down to the bayou and ended his killing spree, but that did not bring his family back...