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4.2 AVERAGE
4.2 AVERAGE
I just don't know where these books are going anymore. If you read my review of the last "adventure" (its in quotes because adventures generally involve exciting things and, you know, adventures) in this series you'll know that I've been riding shotgun with damaged, magnet for destruction and death Parker for thirteen books now and I'm getting damned tired of all the rest stops we keep getting off on.
When I first discovered Connolly years ago I felt the kind of joy only a novelholic knows when you connect with a writer in that impossible to describe way that will keep you coming back to them for the rest of your life. I will never not read his books because of those first journey's he took me on. He was unafraid of the dark, he almost seemed to revel in it. His early stories about Parker's dealings with the worst, most corrupt kind of evil this side of heaven or earth are still with me. People ask me about my favorite bad guys in literature and I don't even have to think I just roll out the antagonists of Charlie Parker's first three books. Because they don't get any more horrible or deliciously appalling than that. I don't even want to describe them because I want you, if you like this kind of thing, to find them for yourselves.
I don't know what happened to that Charlie or that darkness that Connolly seemed to tap so easily. I do know that he and Charlie have been basically treading water for the last five books in this series and I'm treading right along with them but dear god if something doesn't happen soon I may just give up and let the sea take me.
These books have always hinged on who Charlie really is. Is he a full blooded human who just happens to intuitively connect with the absolute worst the world has to offer or is he something more? Is he actually connected in a tangible way to the darkness he fights? That's always been the question. But at this point its like there's a scratch on the record and I've been hearing "who is he? who is he? who is he?" over and over and over....
The story has been plateauing now for years. As I said in my last review Charlie gets wind of some sort of crime (and those themselves do not pack nearly the grotesque punch they once did) he gets involved, the people actually in charge tell him to screw off, he gets involved anyway, Angel and Louis show up and act adorable and intimidating, there's a bunch of side conversations between people about WHO THE HECK IS CHARLIE REALLLY!?!?!?!, a couple of a not really scary or tense scenes where the bad guys kinda sorta torture someone or kill something, and then Charlie shows up and either dispatches things himself or Angel and Louis do it while he keeps the bad guy talking. Then we get like a two page epilogue where some unseen something that has been "waiting" for the entire span of this series sits there continuing to, well, wait. I don't know what it is or what the hell its waiting for.
This book is no different, well except for one rather interesting development it seems Parker's daughter may be the one with the real supernatural power here. Not a bad idea but again its so underdeveloped that it barely registers . So points for that.
This time around Parker is recovering from a near death experience (which as I said in my last write up might have had more impact if we didn't discover at the end of the last book that he HAD survived. Its called a cliffhanger John) at a beach rental next door to a twitchy lady and her precocious daughter. He's going back and forth on whether he wants to get back into private detecting and there's actually some nice character development stuff with him and Louis and Angel (a gay couple who are also the best assassin ever and a really savvy cat burglar respectively), and some equally good stuff with his old flame Rachel (who's been in the back seat for like six books now) and his six year old daughter Samantha. It was interesting to see characters who are typically either Parker's cheerleaders or angry at him because of what he does really starting to examine how they feel about him.
Twitchy lady has a secret she doesn't want anyone finding out and she balks when Parker tries to get all up in her business. Then a body washes up on the beach and you'd think that would be exciting but it really isn't. There's a nameless villain doing villainy things that are not only stupid but pointless. I don't think I'm spoiling things too much to say that basically a crime gets committed but to hide it the bad guys commit another crime hoping to distract the police from the original one. This immediately doesn't work because of one small plot point that we are given like two chapters in but Connolly gets very hung up on reiterating how this second crime was intended as a distraction like we somehow missed that when he first laid it out.
The other issue is one that drives me absolutely nutty in mysteries. You know what I hate more than anything in a whodunnit? When the dude whodunnit is in the background of the whole book, we get chapters about them or from their perspective and you spend the whole time trying to work out who it could be and then you get to the reveal and its....that random from chapter one who had like one scene where their name was mentioned and then they never showed up again.
God I hate that.
So that happens. All is revealed and there I go back to chapter one to try to figure out where the hell I'd even read the person's name. There's a bit more to the outcome, its kind of a double switcheroo and its not half bad for your average noir writer but for Connolly it just feels lazy.
I'm hard on him because he's such a bloody good writer and I love this series in spite of the fact that its been trapped in the spin cycle for so long. He's better then this dammnit and its infuriating.
There were some great moments in this one that I guess at least made me feel better since I've barely managed to finish the preceding four or five books. Connolly does dark comedy really, really well and it always feels like kind of a modern day Bogey and Bacall repartee when Parker and his various misfit crime solving friends get together. It was also nice to see people appreciating him for once. Parker spends so much time on the outs with everyone so it was cool to see how people really reacted to him being in danger.
But I miss the dark. And I know it sounds gross but I miss the bloodshed and the agony and the horrible, horrible stuff that gave me so many nightmares. The reason it worked was because of Charlie Parker. He was this great, world weary, knight errant who entered the dark and instead of fighting it he embraced it because he was part of it.
Now he's just this schlubby guy who's getting old and disappears for half the book while other people solve the crime around him...sigh.
When I first discovered Connolly years ago I felt the kind of joy only a novelholic knows when you connect with a writer in that impossible to describe way that will keep you coming back to them for the rest of your life. I will never not read his books because of those first journey's he took me on. He was unafraid of the dark, he almost seemed to revel in it. His early stories about Parker's dealings with the worst, most corrupt kind of evil this side of heaven or earth are still with me. People ask me about my favorite bad guys in literature and I don't even have to think I just roll out the antagonists of Charlie Parker's first three books. Because they don't get any more horrible or deliciously appalling than that. I don't even want to describe them because I want you, if you like this kind of thing, to find them for yourselves.
I don't know what happened to that Charlie or that darkness that Connolly seemed to tap so easily. I do know that he and Charlie have been basically treading water for the last five books in this series and I'm treading right along with them but dear god if something doesn't happen soon I may just give up and let the sea take me.
These books have always hinged on who Charlie really is. Is he a full blooded human who just happens to intuitively connect with the absolute worst the world has to offer or is he something more? Is he actually connected in a tangible way to the darkness he fights? That's always been the question. But at this point its like there's a scratch on the record and I've been hearing "who is he? who is he? who is he?" over and over and over....
The story has been plateauing now for years. As I said in my last review Charlie gets wind of some sort of crime (and those themselves do not pack nearly the grotesque punch they once did) he gets involved, the people actually in charge tell him to screw off, he gets involved anyway, Angel and Louis show up and act adorable and intimidating, there's a bunch of side conversations between people about WHO THE HECK IS CHARLIE REALLLY!?!?!?!, a couple of a not really scary or tense scenes where the bad guys kinda sorta torture someone or kill something, and then Charlie shows up and either dispatches things himself or Angel and Louis do it while he keeps the bad guy talking. Then we get like a two page epilogue where some unseen something that has been "waiting" for the entire span of this series sits there continuing to, well, wait. I don't know what it is or what the hell its waiting for.
This book is no different, well except for one rather interesting development
This time around Parker is recovering from a near death experience (which as I said in my last write up might have had more impact if we didn't discover at the end of the last book that he HAD survived. Its called a cliffhanger John) at a beach rental next door to a twitchy lady and her precocious daughter. He's going back and forth on whether he wants to get back into private detecting and there's actually some nice character development stuff with him and Louis and Angel (a gay couple who are also the best assassin ever and a really savvy cat burglar respectively), and some equally good stuff with his old flame Rachel (who's been in the back seat for like six books now) and his six year old daughter Samantha. It was interesting to see characters who are typically either Parker's cheerleaders or angry at him because of what he does really starting to examine how they feel about him.
Twitchy lady has a secret she doesn't want anyone finding out and she balks when Parker tries to get all up in her business. Then a body washes up on the beach and you'd think that would be exciting but it really isn't. There's a nameless villain doing villainy things that are not only stupid but pointless. I don't think I'm spoiling things too much to say that basically a crime gets committed but to hide it the bad guys commit another crime hoping to distract the police from the original one. This immediately doesn't work because of one small plot point that we are given like two chapters in but Connolly gets very hung up on reiterating how this second crime was intended as a distraction like we somehow missed that when he first laid it out.
The other issue is one that drives me absolutely nutty in mysteries. You know what I hate more than anything in a whodunnit? When the dude whodunnit is in the background of the whole book, we get chapters about them or from their perspective and you spend the whole time trying to work out who it could be and then you get to the reveal and its....that random from chapter one who had like one scene where their name was mentioned and then they never showed up again.
God I hate that.
So that happens. All is revealed and there I go back to chapter one to try to figure out where the hell I'd even read the person's name. There's a bit more to the outcome, its kind of a double switcheroo and its not half bad for your average noir writer but for Connolly it just feels lazy.
I'm hard on him because he's such a bloody good writer and I love this series in spite of the fact that its been trapped in the spin cycle for so long. He's better then this dammnit and its infuriating.
There were some great moments in this one that I guess at least made me feel better since I've barely managed to finish the preceding four or five books. Connolly does dark comedy really, really well and it always feels like kind of a modern day Bogey and Bacall repartee when Parker and his various misfit crime solving friends get together. It was also nice to see people appreciating him for once. Parker spends so much time on the outs with everyone so it was cool to see how people really reacted to him being in danger.
But I miss the dark. And I know it sounds gross but I miss the bloodshed and the agony and the horrible, horrible stuff that gave me so many nightmares. The reason it worked was because of Charlie Parker. He was this great, world weary, knight errant who entered the dark and instead of fighting it he embraced it because he was part of it.
Now he's just this schlubby guy who's getting old and disappears for half the book while other people solve the crime around him...sigh.
After the anaemic The Wolf in Winter – where John Connolly resorted to the risible authorial gimmick of leaving the reader unsure if Charlie Parker lives or dies – A Song of Shadows hit me like a bolt out of the blue.
This is the strongest Parker novel in a long, long time, and probably the best after The Killing Kind. More importantly, it reinvigorates this long-running series. Book #13 sees Connolly hit a mother lode similar to that he mined in Every Dead Thing: a rich vein of terror, horror and existential angst that builds up to something far more than the sum of its parts.
Similar to The Wrath of Angels, Connolly chooses a historical backdrop on which to hang his tale. Here though the history lesson does not overwhelm the ongoing story of Parker’s discovery of his true nature, and the end game towards all the disparate pieces are now grimly moving.
In focusing on the atrocities of the Third Reich in its concentration camps – and in particular at Lubsko, about which I knew nothing until I read this book – Connolly found a subject matter to ignite his anger.
A Song of Shadows is a very angry book, as well as being resolutely grim and dark. The theme of the Nazis and their moral culpability in the Holocaust is a perfect lodestone for the moral ambiguity embodied by Charlie Parker himself. (This is not to detract in any way from the horror of the events in the Second World War. Instead, Connolly is highly empassioned about the nature of good and evil, and there is much food for thought here as a result).
What is quite startling here is how Connolly embraces this duality of Parker, which is something he has hinted at before but always ended up skirting. I got the feeling, especially with The Wolf in Winter, that Connolly was balancing the commercial considerations of a highly successful (and profitable) series against his instinct as a writer to head into uncharted territory.
A Song of Shadows is a perfect marriage of these difficult elements. Connolly seems to have a renewed energy and urgency that translates into a cracking read that I devoured in two days. There are a couple of narrative sleights of hand that are breathtaking (and carried out with such deftness that I was strongly reminded how technically assured a writer Connolly can be).
The ending, is quite simply, jaw-dropping. (It does tie-in quite neatly with The Burning Soul, so this is definitely not an entry point for first-time Connolly readers). But what an assured and thrilling denouement to one of the best books in Connolly’s oeuvre to date. Long live Charlie Parker and his many demons.
This is the strongest Parker novel in a long, long time, and probably the best after The Killing Kind. More importantly, it reinvigorates this long-running series. Book #13 sees Connolly hit a mother lode similar to that he mined in Every Dead Thing: a rich vein of terror, horror and existential angst that builds up to something far more than the sum of its parts.
Similar to The Wrath of Angels, Connolly chooses a historical backdrop on which to hang his tale. Here though the history lesson does not overwhelm the ongoing story of Parker’s discovery of his true nature, and the end game towards all the disparate pieces are now grimly moving.
In focusing on the atrocities of the Third Reich in its concentration camps – and in particular at Lubsko, about which I knew nothing until I read this book – Connolly found a subject matter to ignite his anger.
A Song of Shadows is a very angry book, as well as being resolutely grim and dark. The theme of the Nazis and their moral culpability in the Holocaust is a perfect lodestone for the moral ambiguity embodied by Charlie Parker himself. (This is not to detract in any way from the horror of the events in the Second World War. Instead, Connolly is highly empassioned about the nature of good and evil, and there is much food for thought here as a result).
What is quite startling here is how Connolly embraces this duality of Parker, which is something he has hinted at before but always ended up skirting. I got the feeling, especially with The Wolf in Winter, that Connolly was balancing the commercial considerations of a highly successful (and profitable) series against his instinct as a writer to head into uncharted territory.
A Song of Shadows is a perfect marriage of these difficult elements. Connolly seems to have a renewed energy and urgency that translates into a cracking read that I devoured in two days. There are a couple of narrative sleights of hand that are breathtaking (and carried out with such deftness that I was strongly reminded how technically assured a writer Connolly can be).
The ending, is quite simply, jaw-dropping. (It does tie-in quite neatly with The Burning Soul, so this is definitely not an entry point for first-time Connolly readers). But what an assured and thrilling denouement to one of the best books in Connolly’s oeuvre to date. Long live Charlie Parker and his many demons.
Easily the best Charlie Parker book since The Lovers (#8). It was, for me, a perfectly balanced Parker book: mystery, the supernatural, vengeance, visceral horror, intellectual horror, and, surprisingly, a nice amount of dry humor. There's a bit where the Falci Brothers pick Parker up that had me giggling. But most of it was witty asides (seriously; who makes jokes about the Reformation?):
“Pastor's here,” she said. “And Father Knowles.” Bloom turned to see the two men waiting at a polite distance. She could see only one car, though. They must have decided to travel together. Martin Luther would have had an embolism."
I can't honestly say Connolly's writing surpasses expectations, because my expectations for what he is able to do are quite high. In this book, Parker is recooperating in a house by the seashore, and we get to experience the salty air and cold sand of a late spring beach. It's a small town--not a village, mind you--so we experience the bookstore, the cafe, the police station (naturally), pieces of the public life.
The plot is one that could have been loaded with triggers, but is handled, in my estimation, with sophistication and nuance. The levity I mentioned is needed, because the plot ends up involving issues surrounding Nazis. I was--appropriately--exposed to just some of the horrors of Nazism in school, and I find the way that it has been used as a construct of evil in much of popular culture to be offensive in simplification and omnipresence. Part of the discussion is the value of prosecuting war crimes, as well sharing one of the lesser-known war-time Nazi crimes.
"Baulman took an instant dislike to Ross. He had the eyes of one who was never disappointed because his expectations of humanity were too low to allow for it."
Interestingly, narrative is rarely from Parker's point of view, but that works out just fine. State Trooper Walsh makes an appearance for a bit; as does Sam, Parker's daughter; a neighbor girl, Amanda; the local Realtor; a couple of people whom we know from the start are villains; the local police chief; and so on. Somehow, though this technique usually drives me to distraction, the story managed to retain front and center.
Just an excellent installment in the series, but as always I'd say this is not the place to begin (you could start at The Lovers, which does have Parker's parents' backstory). This series is really built on Parker's development and to pick it up at a random point misses a lot of the nuance that makes it so meaningful.
"Rachael kissed him on the cheek, and the affection of the gesture filled him with a tender sadness. The night before was lost to them now: It had been a small consecration, a minor epiphany, and no more than that, but sometimes such moments are all that we are given, and they are enough to fuel us, and give us hope that, somewhere down the line, another might be gifted."
“Pastor's here,” she said. “And Father Knowles.” Bloom turned to see the two men waiting at a polite distance. She could see only one car, though. They must have decided to travel together. Martin Luther would have had an embolism."
I can't honestly say Connolly's writing surpasses expectations, because my expectations for what he is able to do are quite high. In this book, Parker is recooperating in a house by the seashore, and we get to experience the salty air and cold sand of a late spring beach. It's a small town--not a village, mind you--so we experience the bookstore, the cafe, the police station (naturally), pieces of the public life.
The plot is one that could have been loaded with triggers, but is handled, in my estimation, with sophistication and nuance. The levity I mentioned is needed, because the plot ends up involving issues surrounding Nazis. I was--appropriately--exposed to just some of the horrors of Nazism in school, and I find the way that it has been used as a construct of evil in much of popular culture to be offensive in simplification and omnipresence. Part of the discussion is the value of prosecuting war crimes, as well sharing one of the lesser-known war-time Nazi crimes.
"Baulman took an instant dislike to Ross. He had the eyes of one who was never disappointed because his expectations of humanity were too low to allow for it."
Interestingly, narrative is rarely from Parker's point of view, but that works out just fine. State Trooper Walsh makes an appearance for a bit; as does Sam, Parker's daughter; a neighbor girl, Amanda; the local Realtor; a couple of people whom we know from the start are villains; the local police chief; and so on. Somehow, though this technique usually drives me to distraction, the story managed to retain front and center.
Just an excellent installment in the series, but as always I'd say this is not the place to begin (you could start at The Lovers, which does have Parker's parents' backstory). This series is really built on Parker's development and to pick it up at a random point misses a lot of the nuance that makes it so meaningful.
"Rachael kissed him on the cheek, and the affection of the gesture filled him with a tender sadness. The night before was lost to them now: It had been a small consecration, a minor epiphany, and no more than that, but sometimes such moments are all that we are given, and they are enough to fuel us, and give us hope that, somewhere down the line, another might be gifted."