John Connolly, The Lovers

What if you were haunted by a pair of lovers whose desire for your destruction was so strong that it defied both death and time? A defiance whose ability to regenerate itself in physical terms makes mortality seem a desperately facile illusion and inconvenience. This novel explores the background of Connolly's detective Charlie Parker, revisiting the stories surrounding his dead Policeman father whose career ended infamously with his suicide after a seemingly senseless killing of two local, unarmed teenagers.

Charlie Parker finds that the past is shrouded by veils of deceit perpetuated by lonely, secretive old men whose motivations and predilections have crippled their lives. And yet the truth seems utterly incredible and even diabolical. There is no release through truth, just a terrible stumble down into a modern day Hades where nothing is worshipped except desire.

I found this book utterly compelling to read; marrow deep horror and a seeping awareness that Connolly's universe contains creatures whose morality is irrecoverably buried in some Dantean hell. The 'lovers' of the title do not even know that they are lovers and a fated couple until the evil that is their mutual destiny begins to inabit their souls like some deadly lodger.

Place, atmosphere and sensory impression combine to prevent any desire to sleep. One of the most engrossing and enthralling books I have read in a very long time.

And where you can only be saved by the dead. Your tragic, loving dead.

Not theirs.

The Lovers

John Connolly

Atria, Jun 2 2009, $26.00

ISBN: 9781416569541

With his private investigator's license revoked (see THE REAPERS), Charlie Parker leaves New York City to tend bar in Portland, Maine. The job gives him time think about the other tragedy in his life besides the murders of his wife and daughter that haunts him. When Charlie was fifteen, his father Will an NYPD cop shot dead two teens, who after he kills them learns they were unarmed. Unable cope, Will committed suicide.

As Charlie digs into the background of that traumatic incident, he finds some shocking evidence that makes him wonder if his beloved parents were his biological ones. He decides to return to Manhattan to investigate and avoid the police. At the same time a frightened disturbed woman is on the run from whatever killed her boyfriend. Writer Mickey Wallace investigates the stranger that haunt the Big Apple; as this pair converge on Charlie, two of the undying also come together wanting Parker dead.

Charlie's focus remains on his personal life, but spins to what happened to his father rather than himself. He is at his best as he begins to uncover shocker after shocker as if someone has connected his body to live electrical wires (see the Cheney torture handbook for more details). He makes the LOVERS a great urban Noir fantasy although the paranormal is kept to the minimal. Readers will relish his escapades as Charlie investigates his father's suicide while the undying want to give him an opportunity to question dad in whatever hell the dead old man resides in.

Harriet Klausner