The Woman in the Woods

January 1, 2018

A young woman whose corpse is found in the forest gave birth before dying, and Charlie Parker is hired to keep an eye on the police investigating the baby's whereabouts. Unfortunately, someone badly intentioned is after the baby, too.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 1, 2018
Private detective Charlie Parker faces a pair of otherworldly foes in a crime novel packed with colorful characters.In the Maine woods, rain exposes the body of a woman buried in a shallow grave. An autopsy reveals she had given birth a day or two before her death, but whether she was murdered or not is unclear. There is no sign of the child's body, and a Star of David has been carved on a nearby tree. Meanwhile, 5-year-old Daniel Weaver lives with his mother, Holly--she is "blond," he is "ebony." She tells him a story of The Woman in the Woods, "spirited away by an ogre." Daniel's toy phone rings throughout the book, and he hears the voice of a strange woman. And in Cadillac, Indiana, an Englishman named Quayle inquires about a pregnant "mongrel [bitch]" named Karis Lamb who had passed through town. Quayle, who might be "the devil himself," has one purpose on Earth: "to locate a single book, and enable it to do its work." It's the Fractured Atlas, which he expects will change the world, replacing the "Old God" with "Not-Gods." Not knowing Karis' fate, he tracks down and kills those protecting her because she may know the book's whereabouts. His delightfully disgusting companion, Pallida Mors, has "the skin of a drowning victim, and the eyes of a doll." Attorney Moxie Castin, who calls himself "Jewish-ish," hires private detective Parker to find Karis' child, "because I want to believe that child is alive." But Parker faces frightful foes. Every character is expertly drawn--Parker's friends Louis and Angel are a pair of gay criminals, and Louis, who is black, blows up a Chevy truck that was flying Confederate flags. The owner, Billy Ocean, learned from his daddy not to use racial slurs, but he really hates "Negroes." Quayle hates everybody, and his racism is just a part of his overall rottenness. There's also a group of rich people called the Backers, who ages ago sold out to dark, arcane forces. Some of them think Parker is "partly divine" because he's survived so many attacks.A complicated plot, richly drawn characters, and a vein of horror will keep readers devouring the pages.

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Starred review from April 30, 2018
Connolly’s 16th thriller featuring PI Charlie Parker (after 2017’s A Game of Ghosts) perfectly blends the natural and the supernatural. After a woman’s corpse is found in the woods near Parker’s Maine home, attorney Moxie Castin asks him to trace the child to whom the woman gave birth shortly before her death. Castin is moved to do so by a Star of David etched into a nearby tree, which suggests to him that the dead woman was a fellow Jew. A terrifying pair—an English lawyer known only as Quayle and a remorseless assassin, Pallida Mors—are also interested in finding the infant. In addition, they have been killing members of an informal underground group protecting refugees from domestic violence, who may have helped a woman named Karis Lamb elude an abusive man. Quayle’s quest involves enabling the “return of the Not-Gods, thus bringing about the end of days.” Several of the victims, all of whom are fully developed characters, choose death rather than betrayal, and the end result is both unnerving and moving. Fans will agree that this is Connelly’s masterpiece. Agent: Darley Anderson, Darley Anderson Literary (U.K.).

May 1, 2018
In the latest Charlie Parker mystery, the Maine PI is hired by a lawyer acquaintance to keep an eye on the police, who are digging into the disappearance of a baby who was apparently born shortly before its mother died (her body was found in the woods). Charlie soon figures out that someone else is tracking the investigation, too, but for different, darker reasons?someone who, it seems, is willing to commit murder. Charlie has a lot of questions to answer: Was the dead woman murdered? If so, by whom? And why? Why is someone else apparently looking for the missing baby? Connolly's writing is as impeccable as ever, and, typical of the series, he layers on supernatural elements (here, a dead woman is evidently making telephone calls) without compromising the real-world feel of the story. No shortcuts for Connolly, no easy outs explained away by vague, otherworldly elements: he brings the same rigorous demand for believability, even a kind of realism, to the unreal components of the story as he does for the more straightforward bits. Another winner in a consistently high-quality series.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)