The Killing Kind - Softcover

Connolly, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0743456378 ISBN 13: 9780743456371

Publisher: Pocket Star, 2003

Synopsis

John Connolly's Every Dead Thing and Dark Hollow were international bestsellers. Now the "compulsively readable" (Publishers Weekly) Connolly returns to heart-pounding form with a crime novel that combines sinister menace with superb style.
THE KILLING KIND
When the discovery of a mass grave in northern Maine reveals the grim truth behind the disappearance of a religious community, private detective Charlie Parker is drawn into a violent conflict with a group of zealots intent on tracking down a relic that could link them to the slaughter. Haunted by the ghost of a small boy and tormented by the demonic killer known as Mr. Pudd, Parker is forced to fight for his lover, his friends...and his very soul.

About this title

Review:

Spider-bites are a nasty way to die, and there is a man out there with an unusual taste for insect venom of all kinds and for the deaths of those who disagree with or affront him. John Connolly's sleuth Charlie Parker is free of the ghosts of his slaughtered wife and child, but sooner or later new ghosts come to him demanding silently that he avenge them. In The Killing Kind, it is not Grace, the ex-girlfriend whose faked suicide he is hired to investigate, so much as the dead fanatics she was killed for writing a thesis on. The Aroostook Baptists disappeared into the gloomy woods of North Maine in the sixties and nothing more is known until road workers find a mass burial. Connolly provides his usual excellent combination of snappy one-liners (many of them from Parker's gay assassin sidekicks Angel and Louis) together with scenes of the utmost terror. Parker soon realises that the spider killer, Elmer Pudd, is only the tool of someone far worse, a sanctimonious artist in intolerance and mayhem--and it is only by carefully measured doses that we come to realise just how bad that is going to be. --Roz Kaveney

Review:

The unrivalled master of Maine noir. Menace has never been so seductive. (Guardian)

Fast-paced, violent thriller writing done with consummate skill. (Private Eye)

Connolly does the chill factor brilliantly, creating horror out of the sort of misguided religious fervour not seen since Waco. Mass graves, Parker's sixth sense and deadly spiders set the mind and pulse racing. (Daily Mirror)

About this edition

• Publisher: Pocket Star
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0743456378
• ISBN 13: 9780743456371
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Number of pages: 480