A Time of Torment (A Charlie Parker Thriller) by John Connolly

Hardback:  They're circling now, then falling, descending in a slow gyre, dropping so gently that their approach can barely be discerned.  They are hawks in the form of men, and the one who leads them is a being doubly transformed:  lost and found, human and bird;  youngest of them, yet strangely old.  He has endured, and in this endurance he has been forged anew.  He has seen a world beyond this one.  He has glimpsed the face of a new god.  He is at peace with himself, and so he will wage war.

Charlie Parker is hunting and the Dead King is his prey.

Jerome Burnel was once a hero.  He intervened to prevent multiple killings and in doing so damned himself.  His life was torn apart.  He was imprisoned, brutalized.

But in his final days, with the hunters circling, he tells his story to private detective Charlie Parker.  He speaks of the girl who was marked for death but was saved, of the ones who tormented him, and the being that they serve.

Parker is not like other men.  He died, and was reborn.  He is ready to wage war.

Now he will descend upon a strange, isolated community called the Cut, and face down a force of men who rule by terror, intimidation, and murder.

All in the name of the entity hiding in a ruined tower.

All in the name of the Dead King.

A Time of Torment (2016) is the fourteenth book in the distinctive Charlie Parker thriller series.  It is also available on paperback, Kindle and audio form.

About the author:  John Connolly was born in Dublin in 1968.  His debut - Every Dead Thing (1999) - which introduced the character of private detective Charlie Parker, swiftly launched him right into the front rank of thriller writers, and all his subsequent novels have been Sunday Times bestsellers.  Books To Die For (2012), a nonfiction anthology, which he edited with Declan Burke, was the winner of the 2013 Agatha, Anthony and Macavity Awards for Best Critical/Biographical Book of the Year.  He is the first non-American writer to win the US Shamus award for Every Dead Thing.  In 2007 he was awarded the Irish Post Award for Literature.

Rating:  6/5