Every Dead Thing

This is the inaugural outing of Irish journalist John Connolly's "Charlie 'Bird' Parker" series of mystery/ thriller/ procedurals. The book won the LA Times "Book of the Year" (1999) and the Shamus Award for "Best First Novel" (1999) --a first for a book by a non-American author. It is long with two distinct storylines--causing Booklist to criticize it for "excess baggage." But in order to understand the rest of the series (and there are 20 books in the series), you need to know why Charlie Parker is the way he is; he is a recovering alcoholic with both a thirst for revenge--bloody if necessary--and a huge capacity for empathy. Parker is a former detective with the NYC Police Department, spending more and more of his life in a bottle, who comes home to find his wife and young daughter torturously mutiliated and very dead. The descriptions are graphic, so if grisly descriptions upset you definitely stay away from this book and this series. Two years later, he eventually sobers up and begins re-entering the stream of life as a private investigator of low-level crimes; then a former partner and NYPD asks him to help solve the case of a missing woman, which is part of a cover up for a ring of child abusers and killers. Parker never lets go of his quest for revenge even though he immerses himself in the search, and he gets aid from a strange quarter--a psychic Black woman in the swamps of Louisiana, who says the Traveling Man has come to her in her dreams and that he has already killed a young woman and left her in the swamp before killing Parker's family. Parker goes to Louisiana and hooks up with an FBI agent who is working the case. In both storylines, Parker must delve into history in order to find the perpetrators in the present, so the storylines are indeed complicated. But the characters are fascinating and Connolly kept me guessing until the very end about the identify of the killers. 

You can get more about the plot and characters from Kirkus. Publishers Weekly says Connolly's "prose rings of '40s L.A. noir, la Chandler and Hammett..." and that the "plot seldom falters and each character is memorable." I was hooked from the get-go.