Critical Mick

Time to rate The Unquiet on:

Critical Mick's Patented Hardboil Checklist Alcoholic Ex-Cop Hero? Serial Killers? Wisecracks? Wiseguys? Dead Bodies? Kills o' plenty Interesting Locations? Redhead Love Interest? Close enough!   Spooky Shit?

Dublin man John Connolly remains on top form in his latest Charlie Parker private detective novel, The Unquiet. From the first page it is satisfyingly dense with convincing character portraits, secerts burning to be let out, and rolling foggy banks of mood, mood, mood. It's an escape to Maine- a darker Maine, after all the leaves have fallen- in portable paperback format.

Potted Plot: private eye Charlie Parker is called upon by an endangered woman with a murky past. He drives his Mustang over to Rebecca Clay's big creepy house and learns that she is being stalked by an intreguing character with blood and fresh prison tats on his hands. Parker himself is soon being stalked himself, though not by a foe that a troupe of recurring series characters can hold at bay.

This is a complement: hundreds of engaging pages pass before people start dying. Everyday horrors are explored, and exposed not in a pulp-thriller fashion but in in the way they are handled in real life. At the core of Connolly's eighth novel is the sexual abuse of children and the effects that arise like ghosts from graves many decades later. It's doubtless. The Unquiet is restless with rage. It's compelling stuff, even the unexpected asides. (There's a non-sequoiter where Parker's friends get the better of a Jersey musclehead. Class!)

Also Class: my copy of the novel came with a CD of accompanying music selected by John Connolly. Multimedia, baby!!

One disappointment about The Unquiet was its occassional dip into stereotype. Charlie Parker attends a dinner party thrown by Portland's elite. Been there, done that, already saw a Simpson's episode taking the piss out of these characters. Later there's a scene at a trailer park. I lived in a trailer for a time. The tales that could be told are more shocking than any old familiar trashy impressions.

The Unquiet's storyline is strong enough that I was able to overlook the novel's few shortcomings, but the Nerd in me has to whack my pocket-protector against the 480-page paperback like a judge's gavel. While all Connolly's other legal and procedural details seem to speak authoritatively, the novel's computery details are a load of bollocks.

Ricky's got his computer set up to spit out a line of technobabble. I would have been convinced of the legitimacy in The Unquiet's stirring portrayals of systematic prison abuses and of how child rape cases are prosecuted if these computery details had not been bogus.

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Critical Mick says: Drawing from actual places, causes and inspiration, Connolly kicks ass yet again by battling Charlie Parker against baddies in the shadow of the supernatural. Crank it up, baby!