A BOOK OF BONES

A BOOK OF BONES by John Connolly

On a lonely moor in the northeast of England, the body of a young woman is discovered near the site of a vanished church. In the south, a girl lies buried beneath a Saxon mound. To the southeast, the ruins of a priory hide a human skull.

Each is a sacrifice, a summons.

And something in the shadows has heard the call.

But another is coming: Parker the hunter, the avenger. Parker’s mission takes him from Maine to the deserts of the Mexican border; from the canals of Amsterdam to the streets of London – he will track those who would cast this world into darkness.

Parker fears no evil.

But evil fears him . . .

The new Charlie Parker novel is always a highly anticipated event for me. It’s like getting together with a group of old friends that studiously avoid social media and the way that medium devalues the joy and sometimes sadness of “catching up”. A Book of Bones was more like being invited to a wedding to which those old friends had also been invited and getting the highlights of what we’d all been up to despite the distractions of the other guests and the too loud music. In this case the too loud music was without a doubt the intrusion of the historical “short stories’ injected into the almost 700 page novel.

I get it that each of these well researched – and maybe that was the weakness because I felt the historical interludes in some way were there to make good use of the material gleaned through researching the background context for the novel – flashbacks were meant to add to the huge tapestry of the story, but I still feel the novel would have been more immediately engaging without them.

When the author decided to free us all from the need for each Parker novel to be capable of being read without any reference to previous instalments – around the fifth book I think – it was great for the avid fans, such as myself, that we could get immersed in the story without feeling we had to bring along the new guy or girl who joined the group and kept asking questions. Ironically, and I’m willing to put this down to age if I have to, I found it difficult to pick up where the previous instalment left off and would have welcomed a little bit of backfill – can’t please everyone I guess.

Now before you think I didn’t enjoy A Book of Bones I have to tell you I really did. I didn’t welcome the near 700 pages because of the detours and flashbacks. Nor did I enjoy the switch from the US setting to the UK. Another aspect I wasn’t fond of was the fact Parker & Co were absent quite a lot and they felt like minor characters at times. But when all is said and done it was a good read and as always, because this goes without saying, an extremely well written novel.

This appears to be the culmination of the story running through the past six or so novels and hopefully Charlie Parker will move on to new thrilling tales – even if they have less of a supernatural lean to them and maybe that’s not such a bad thing. I’m still looking forward to meeting my old friends and catching up with their news!