A Time of Torment

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The Number One bestseller, now out in paperback.

Jerome Burnel was once a hero. He intervened to prevent multiple killings and in doing so damned himself. His life was torn apart. He was imprisoned, 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.

'One of the writer's finest achievements . . . new readers - start here ' Independent
'A consistently excellent series . . .a dizzying ride to hell and back' Sunday Herald
'Magical, horrific, poetic, gothic . Unique and rewarding' Maxim Jakubowski

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

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"). Agent: Darley Anderson, Darley Anderson Literary (U.K.). (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Booklist Review

In the latest Charlie Parker thriller, the tormented private eye takes on the case of a man who believes he's marked for death. Initially skeptical, Parker soon learns that the man was right, and that buried deep in the rural countryside is a community that has existed for many years, isolated and almost entirely unknown to the outside world. As regular readers of the series are well aware, there are virtually no lengths to which Parker won't go to bring evil to its knees. Right from the start, the Charlie Parker series, whose first installment, 1999's Every Dead Thing, won a Shamus Award for best first private-eye novel, has grabbed readers with its combination of hard-boiled-detective and supernatural elements. Even in a genre full of tortured protagonists, Parker's history is darker than most: the murders of his wife and daughter, frequent battles with otherwordly foes, even a brief foray into the world of the dead. And yet this is one of the things that make the Parker novels so good Connolly keeps Charlie solidly grounded in the real world. He's not a supernatural being himself. He's an ordinary man, an ex-cop turned private eye; and the books aren't horror novels, they're private eye stories. Another excellent entry in a consistently fine series.--Pitt, David Copyright 2016 Booklist