The Reapers (Charlie Parker Series #7)

by John Connolly

Overview

Darkly brilliant and intuitive private detective Charlie Parker returns in the next thrilling installment of the New York Times bestselling series by John Connolly about an elite group of killers.

The Reapers are the elite of killers, the best at their trade, and Louis, confidante of troubled private detective Charlie Parker, is one of their number. Now the sins of his past are about to be visited upon him, for someone is hunting Louis, targeting his home, his businesses, and his partner, Angel. The instrument of his revenge is Bliss, the killer of killers, the most feared of assasins, and a man with a personal vendetta against Louis.

But when Louis and Angel decide to strike back, they disappear, and their friends are forced to band together to find them. They are led by Parker, a killer himself, a reaper in waiting...

The harvest is about to begin.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501122675
Publisher:	Atria/Emily Bestler Books
Publication date:	11/24/2015
Series:	Charlie Parker Series , #7
Pages:	400
Sales rank:	285,110
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.10(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

John Connolly is the author of the #1 internationally bestselling Charlie Parker thrillers series, the supernatural collection Nocturnes, the Samuel Johnson Trilogy for younger readers, and (with Jennifer Ridyard) the Chronicles of the Invaders series. He lives in Dublin, Ireland. For more information, see his website at JohnConnollyBooks.com, or follow him on Twitter @JConnollyBooks.

Hometown:

Dublin, Ireland

Date of Birth:

May 31, 1968

Place of Birth:

Dublin, Ireland

Education:

B.A. in English, Trinity College Dublin, 1992; M.A. in Journalism, Dublin City University, 1993

Website:

http://www.johnconnolly.co.uk

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

There are so many killings, so many victims, so many lives lost and ruined every day, that it can be hard to keep track of them all, hard to make the connections that might bring cases to a close. Some are obvious: the man who kills his girlfriend, then takes his own life, either out of remorse or because of his own inability to face the consequences of his actions; or the tit-for-tat murders of hoodlums, gangsters, drug dealers, each killing leading inexorably to another as the violence escalates. One death invites the next, extending a pale hand in greeting, grinning as the ax falls, the blade cuts. There is a chain of events that can easily be reconstructed, a clear trail for the law to follow.

But there are other killings that are harder to connect, the links between them obscured by great distances, by the passage of years, by the layering of this honeycomb world as time folds softly upon itself.

The honeycomb world does not hide secrets: it stores them. It is a repository of buried memories, of half-forgotten acts.

In the honeycomb world, everything is connected.

*
• *

The St. Daniil sat on Brightwater Court, not far from the cavernous dinner clubs on Brighton Beach Avenue and Coney Island Avenue where couples of all ages danced to music in Russian, Spanish, and English, ate Russian food, shared vodka and wine, and watched stage shows that would not have been out of place in some of the more modest Reno hotels, or on a cruise ship, yet the St. Daniil was far enough away from them to render itself distinct in any number of ways. The building that it occupied overlooked the ocean, and the boardwalk with its principal trio of restaurants, the Volna, the Tatiana, and the Winter Garden, now screened to protect their patrons from the cool sea breeze and the stinging sands. Nearby was the Brighton playground, where, during the day, old men sat at stone tables playing cards while children cavorted nearby, the young and the not-so-young united together in the same space. New condos had sprung up to the east and west, part of the transformation that Brighton Beach had undergone in recent years.

But the St. Daniil belonged to an older dispensation, a different Brighton Beach, one occupied by the kind of businesses that made their money from those who were on nodding terms with poverty: check-cashing services that took 25 percent of every check cashed, then offered loans at a similar monthly rate to cover the shortfall; discount stores that sold cheap crockery with cracked glaze, and firetrap Christmas decorations all year round; former mom-and-pop grocery stores that were now run by the kind of men who looked like they might have the remains of mom and pop rotting in their cellars; laundromats frequented by men who smelt of the streets and who would routinely strip down to filthy shorts and sit, nearly naked, waiting for their clothes to wash before giving them a single desultory spin in the dryer (for every quarter counted) and then dress in the still-damp clothes, folding the rest into plastic garbage bags and venturing back onto the streets, their garments steaming slightly in the air; pawnshops that did a steady trade in redeemed and unredeemed items, for there was always someone willing to benefit from the misfortune of another; and storefronts with no name above the window and only a battered counter inside, the shadowy business conducted within of no interest to those who needed to be told its nature. Most of those places were gone now, relegated to side streets, to less desirable neighborhoods, pushed farther and farther back from the avenue and the sea, although those who needed...

Editorial Reviews

"Connolly has crafted one of the most darkly intriguing books this reviewer has encountered in more than three decades of reading crime fiction. Never less than graceful and assured, his writing is often lyrical, but in his portrait of the Fulci brothers, he employs humor and panache that recalls Trevanian at his snarkiest. To call this a page-turner is to damn it with faint praise. Veteran crime fans will want to savor every note-perfect word." —Booklist (Starred Review)

"A definite nail-biter." —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

"This latest offering from Connolly is as dark and convoluted as his previous novels and just as enjoyable." —Library Journal

"A lightning strike of a novel. He couldn't write a boring book if you put a gun to his head."—Rocky Mountain News (Grade A review)

" Connolly is as much amaster of probing psyche and motivation as he is in plot construction and language. " —Albuquerque Journal

"A master at the intensely dark thriller with undertones of the western and horror novels....Connolly imbues his novels with a prose so rich that he invests a kind of poetry in his violent tales." —South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Fort Lauderdale)

"Better than just about anything else out there. His is a name to remember." —The Anniston Star (Alabama)

"Connolly, as befits his Irish heritage, is a fine storyteller and manages to weave his tale in dark and compelling language...The book succeeds as a thriller....Fans of Clint Eastwood or Charles Bronson movies will love it.” — The Tampa Tribune

"Connolly has set the bar high in each of his pitch-dark stories. The Reapers, written in a prose so rich that there is a kind of poetry in the violence, more than lives up to the standard." —Pittsburgh Tribune

"'The Reapers' sets the standard in noir...Connolly imbues his novels with a prose so rich that he invests a kind of poetry in his violent tales." —The Myrtle Beach Sun-News (South Carolina)

"[The Reapers] is as taut and tense as anything John Connolly has served up previously...Connolly accelerates the action in a truly masterful manner." —Evening Herald(Ireland)

"Uncommonly fine,supple, sensuous prose… these dark, violent, volatile books work brilliantly within the genre while consistently provoking and subverting it. An utterly compelling tale of mystery and imagination." —The Irish Times

"The Reapers fairly crackles with menace; the portrayal of serious-minded individuals utterly intent on completing their dark objectives is masterly. The author has adapted and blended elements of both the neo-noir and gothic tradition to produce a stylish piece, from which a darkly laconic sense of humour protrudes like a razorblade from an apple. In Connolly's world, sentimentality gets abducted from outside a porno cinema and mercilessly pistol-whipped in a dank basement.The Reapers is all the better for it." —The Sunday Business Post (Ireland)

From the Publisher