July 27, 2015
In Connolly’s gripping 13th Charlie Parker thriller (after 2014’s The Wolf in Winter), the normally peaceful town of Boreas, Maine, where the PI has retreated, is suddenly hit with several murders in rapid succession. First, four members of a family—the parents and two teenage daughters—are shot dead in their house. Then a body washes ashore not far from the home of Ruth Winter, a single mother with a daughter who’s nine, about the same age as Charlie’s. While visiting Ruth, Charlie notices that she has removed the mezuzah from her front door, is unusually apprehensive about something, and refuses, despite Charlie’s urging, to reveal what she knows about the drowned man found on the beach. Cory Bloom, Boreas’s chief of police, and Gordon Walsh, a Maine State Police detective, feed Charlie information as he doggedly pursues the killer, in the process offering himself as bait. The fast-paced action builds to a shocking ending. Agent: Darley Anderson, Darley Anderson Literary.