Dark Hollow
by John Connolly
List Price:
Our Price: $3.50
You Save: $4.49 (56%)
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Buy Used: from $0.01 (click here)
Category: Book
See more book details and other editions
Book Summary Information
Author: John ConnollyEdition: Mass Market Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2002-08-27
ISBN: 074341022X
Number of pages: 528
Publisher: Pocket Books
Book Reviews of Dark Hollow
Book Review: Great sequel to EVERY DEAD THING
Summary: 5 Stars
DARK HOLLOW is the sequel to John Connolly's debut novel, EVERY DEAD THING. Like the latter book, HOLLOW stars former NYPD detective Charlie Parker, a recovering alcoholic whose wife and daughter were horrifically murdered while Parker was drunk in a bar; HOLLOW is set roughly a year from when those murders took place. Parker has moved back to Maine, where he spent much of his adolescence, and is living in and restoring his grandfather's old house when a mob deal nearby goes bad and results in Mafiosi and freelance hitmen (in the form of two deviants named Abel and Stritch) descending upon the area.
Parker gets involved when he helps a family friend collect child-support money from her thuggish ex; the money, it turns out, is linked to the aforementioned bad deal. The mob and the freelancers come after Parker. Parker's friends Angel and Louis, an interracial, homosexual thief-and-hitman (respectively) couple, come in to help Parker. And lurking at the periphery of it all is Caleb Kyle, a demonic specter of a serial killer who had tormented Charlie's grandfather decades ago. The violence and suspense escalates from there.
Though the plot may sound complex, Connolly spins it all together in a way that isn't tough to follow and makes sense. As always, Connolly does a masterful job of evoking setting and character, and nails the dialogue more often than not, doubly impressive when one takes into account that Connolly is an Irishman writing about American characters in American settings.
I just finished reading this book for the third or fourth time, if that tells you anything about how much I like the Parker series. I'm eagerly awaiting my pre-ordered copy of Connolly's latest, THE REAPERS, which is coming out later this month, and to kill time I'm rereading all the preceding books in the series.
As I noted in my review of EVERY DEAD THING, the best way to conceive of Connolly's style is to imagine a hardboiled crime novelist (such as Dashiel Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, or James Lee Burke) doing a 1st-person narrative, toughguy PI series that has some supernatural overtones. This genre-blending element (ie, crime + horror)is subtle in EDT and even subtler in HOLLOW, but it tends to increase in Connolly's later books. It differentiates Connolly both from other noir/hardboiled authors, and from stereotypical `mystery' writers. The latter tend to focus on creating a difficult puzzle to be solved by cold-blooded logic or flawless forensics. `Crime' writers, on the other hand, are less interested in the mystery than they are with characters - those who commit crimes, those who solve them, those who are victims of them, etc.
If you like hardboiled crime/noir, and you don't mind a little genre-mixing, you aren't bothered by a fair amount of violence, and you won't be offended by the fact that the protagonist's main sidekicks are a gay couple, you'll get a kick out of Connolly's Charlie Parker novels. I thought DARK HOLLOW was, if anything, a little better than EVERY DEAD THING -- it's a tighter, more focused story, and Connolly really seems to connect with Maine as a setting in an even more profound way than he did with New York, Virginia, and Louisiana, which were the settings of EDT.
That said, I'd still recommend starting with the first book and reading the series in order - EDT is still a great book, and I think it definitely makes more sense when you read them in order anyway.
Summary of Dark Hollow
Internationally acclaimed author John Connolly thrilled readers with his debut bestseller, Every Dead Thing. Now he gives a new name to fear with this atmospheric, spine-tingling page-turner.DARK HOLLOW
Haunted by the murder of his wife and daughter, former New York police detective Charlie Parker retreats home to Scarborough, Maine, to rebuild his shattered life. But his return reawakens old ghosts, drawing him into the manhunt for the killer of yet another mother and child. The obvious suspect is the young woman's violent ex-husband. But there is another possibility -- a mythical killer who lurks deep in the dark hollow of Parker's own past, a figure that has haunt....
Charlie "Bird" Parker, the protagonist of John Connolly's Shamus Award-winning first novel, Every Dead Thing, returns in another moody, masterful thriller set in the beautifully evoked Maine woods where Bird has returned to lick his wounds and recover from the murder of his wife and daughter explored in the earlier book. A half-hearted investigator, Bird agrees to track down the ex-husband of Rita Purdue and get the child support she has coming to her. And when Rita and her son are killed and the finger of suspicion points to Billy Purdue, Bird still feels a moral obligation to find the young man, even though he can't believe he's a killer. Then the bodies begin piling up, among them a bunch of Cambodian killers, some mob-connected Boston gangsters, a couple of people to whom Billy turned for refuge, and an old woman in a nursing home who dies with the name of a bogeyman on her lips--the mysterious Caleb Kyle. It's not the first time Bird's heard that name: his grandfather, who was also a cop, spent his last years trying to track down the legendary monster whose name was always used to scare kids into doing what they were supposed to. And it's not only his grandfather's ghost that haunts Bird as he attempts to solve the mystery of who Billy Purdue really is; the spirits of his dead wife and child urge him on in his attempt to find justice for Rita and her child as well. Aided in his quest by two unlikely but compellingly realized associates, a gay hit man and his lover, Bird confronts the evil that lurks in a mythical monster who turns out to be all too real, and comes to terms, finally, with the grief that has colored his life black since the death of his family. A powerful, well-paced thriller with a complex and interesting hero who bears even further explication--hopefully in his third adventure. --Jane Adams
Irish Books
Book Subjects
- Arts & Photography
- Biographies & Memoirs
- Business & Investing
- Children's Books
- Comics & Graphic Novels
- Computers & Internet
- Cooking, Food & Wine
- Entertainment
- Gay & Lesbian
- Health, Mind & Body
- History
- Home & Garden
- Horror
- Law
- Literature & Fiction
- Mystery & Thrillers
- Nonfiction
- Outdoors & Nature
- Parenting & Families
- Professional & Technical
- Reference
- Religion & Spirituality
- Romance
- Science
- Science Fiction & Fantasy
- Sports
- Teens
- Travel
Most talked about in Irish Books
The Truth About Love (Vintage)by Josephine Hart
Vintage; Published: 2010-08-10; Paperback; Book
Best price: $3.48
Price in other shops:
Contemporary Irish Dramaby Anthony Roche
Palgrave Macmillan; Published: 2009-09-15; Paperback; Book
Best price: $23.00
Price in other shops:
The Playboy of the Western World and Other Plays: Riders to the Sea; The Shadow of the Glen; The Tinker's Wedding; The Well of the Saints; The Playboy ... of the Sorrows (Oxford World's Classics)by J. M. Synge
Oxford University Press, USA; Published: 2009-01-01; Paperback; Book
Best price: $6.83
Price in other shops:
The Wild Irish Girl: A National Tale (Oxford World's Classics)by Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan)
Oxford University Press, USA; Published: 1999-08-12; Paperback; Book
Best price: $5.48
Price in other shops:
Son of Oscar Wilde (Oxford Paperbacks)by Vyvyan Holland
Oxford University Press, USA; Published: 1988-12-15; Paperback; Book
Best price: $105.46
The Oxford Book of Irish Short Stories (Oxford Books of Prose)Oxford University Press, USA; Published: 2002-03-07; Paperback; Book
Best price: $14.04
Price in other shops:
The Bend For Home: A Memoirby Dermot Healy
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; Published: 1998-03-15; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $3.75
Price in other shops:
The Playboy of the Western World and Two Other Irish Plays (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin)by J. M. Synge, William Butler Yeats, Sean O'Casey
Penguin Classics; Published: 1997-05-01; Paperback; Book
Best price: $3.77
Price in other shops:
Selected Poems and Three Plays of William Butler Yeatsby William Butler Yeats
Scribner Paper Fiction; Published: 1987-01-01; Paperback; Book
Best price: $3.00
Price in other shops:
Nights of Rain and Starsby Maeve Binchy
Penguin Audio; Published: 2004-09-16; Audio CD; Book
Best price: $1.10
Price in other shops:
Similar Books and other products
The Burning Soul (Charlie Parker, Book 10)by John Connolly
Atria Books; Published: 2011-09-06; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $9.59
Price in other shops:
Bad Men: A Thrillerby John Connolly
Pocket Books; Published: 2005-04-26; Mass Market Paperback; Book
Best price: $1.79
Price in other shops:
The Lovers: A Thrillerby John Connolly
Pocket Star; Published: 2011-03-29; Mass Market Paperback; Book
Best price: $1.96
Price in other shops:
The Reapers: A Thrillerby John Connolly
Pocket Star; Published: 2009-04-28; Paperback; Book
Best price: $0.74
Price in other shops:
The Black Angel: A Thriller (Charlie Parker Mysteries)by John Connolly
Pocket Star; Published: 2006-01-31; Mass Market Paperback; Book
Best price: $3.29
Price in other shops:
The White Road: A Thrillerby John Connolly
Pocket Books; Published: 2004-01-27; Mass Market Paperback; Book
Best price: $2.50
Price in other shops:
The Whisperers (Charlie Parker, Book 9)by John Connolly
Pocket Books; Published: 2011-06-28; Mass Market Paperback; Book
Best price: $0.85
Price in other shops:
The Unquiet: A Thriller (Charlie Parker Thrillers)by John Connolly
Pocket Star; Published: 2008-03-25; Mass Market Paperback; Book
Best price: $4.40
Price in other shops:
The Killing Kind: A Thrillerby John Connolly
Pocket Star; Published: 2003-02-25; Mass Market Paperback; Book
Best price: $4.37
Price in other shops:
Every Dead Thingby John Connolly
Pocket Books; Published: 2000-07-01; Mass Market Paperback; Book
Best price: $3.45
Price in other shops: