A Book of Bones

My first thought going into A Book of Bones was, “What’s could be better than a new Charlie Parker thriller? A big fat, looooong Charlie Parker thriller.” Following hot on the heels of this thought, came the old adage of being careful what you wish for.

This not to say, though, that A Book of Bones is a bad book. It’s not! It’s really quite good, though, even if John Connolly does revel in a touch too much excess here. There’s an awful lot happening in this seventeenth Charlie Parker thriller, and hoo boy, do I ever mean a lot. Parker is hunting down the killers Atol Quayle and Padilla Mors, and the grimoire — the Fractured Atlas — they possess, a book that, once reconstituted, could destroy the world. Given that Quayle already has much of the Fractured Atlas reassembled and is only missing the final page, the Atlas’s effect on the world is unmistakable, its power already redrawing existence and bleeding hate into the world. Parker’s hunt, meanwhile, takes him from the Mexican border to the Netherlands, and finally to England, giving this book a nice bit of international flair for the first time (I believe) since The Black Angel.

In my review of the prior Parker novel, I wrote “In The Woman in the Woods, we find evil particularly emboldened. I believe this is the first Parker novel written squarely amidst the turmoil of the Trump presidency, a presidency that has served only to empower white supremacists. Beyond the murderous Quayle and his companion Mors, there is the threat of white supremacy and the burgeoning increase in bigotry and racism… It’s interesting to see how the Trump regime has impacted some of my favorite authors and their responses to the creeping nature of this odious moron’s hate into their work.”

In Connolly’s world, the resurgence of white supremacy is emboldened and concretized by the Atlas’s completion, as the tome seeks to rewrite the nature of the world into one of hate and violence. Seeking to empower the evil nature of the Atlas even further, Quayle, Mors, and their confederates have left behind a string of butchered women and evidence pointing toward Muslim killers in an effort to instigate race riots across England. It’s interesting to note the ways in which Connolly has incorporated real-world political upheavals into his recent works as the Atlas has traveled back and forth across the Atlantic, and has perhaps (if only fictionally) given rise to poorly coiffed racists to the highest halls of power with Trump and his regime in the US, and Boris Johnson as Prime Minister in the UK. Some conspiracy theorists may blame the use of Large Hadron Collider for altering the world into this nightmarish vision we currently find ourselves in and the rise of the alt-right, but in Connolly’s world, it’s simply the Atlas… and what is written, may not be so easily erased…

Moving Parker and his companions, Angel and Louis, to the UK also gives the Irish author the opportunity to craft a larger story built off an enormous amount of rich, blood-soaked history. After having set so much of his work in Maine and its surrounding locales, Connolly is finally able to dig deep into England’s past, and he does so with a largess of self-indulgence, leaving nary a stone unturned. Those who may like an enormous amount of English history alongside their brutal pot-boiler occult mysteries should find this to be supremely edifying. A Book of Bones is a veritable treatise on English churches and moors, and just as nearly lush in characters, each of whom have their own plots and subplots and associates, who also have their own machinations in the larger story, not to mention the cyclical nature of time and the historical figures and their relations to the Atlas that fit into the plot, going back a few hundred years.

As I said already, there is a lot happening in this book, and at times A Book of Bones feels every bit of its nearly-700 pages. It’s a massive story, concluding much (but not all) of the story arc that began all the way back to 2012’s The Wolf in Winter beyond merely continuing the story that we left off with in The Woman in the Woods, and even reaches back to Parker’s earliest adventures, like Every Dead Thing (book 1!) and The Killing Kind. To say that this seventeenth entry in the Charlie Parker series is not for the uninitiated is a massive understatement! But I also couldn’t help but wonder if everything in this book was wholly necessary. There are entire sections and subplot that likely could have been cut out whole-cloth with little impact to the overarching narrative, and the book does feel a touch too self-indulgent for its own good. Thank the Old Gods Connolly is a hell of a good writer and, having been reading him for twenty years now, he’s more than earned my trust and loyalty to keep those pages turning.

I feel little guilt at forgiving Connolly some of his excesses here, and the payoff in the book’s climax is an incredible salve for some of the minor irritants that cropped up along the way. Connolly pulls in some terrific cosmic horrors and supremely wicked imagery in his final chapters as he concludes this chapter in Parker’s life, twenty years on. And while it does wrap up some elements of past stories, there’s enough hints here to show there’s plenty more fodder for future thrillers. Frankly, I wouldn’t mind another twenty year’s worth of Charlie Parker books if Connolly is willing, but in any case I certainly look forward to seeing what comes next in his honeycomb world.

This story was both longer and more complex than the previous books in the series. It introduced many new and interesting characters, then killed several of them. As always, it included our hero and his friends in a mystery wrapped in the supernatural, filled with delicious chills. I’m already looking forward to the next book