THE KILLING KIND

Detective Charlie Parker (Dark Hollow, 2001, etc.) finds salvation in this uneven tale of his investigation into the death of a graduate student.

Connolly opens with a gruesome two-step prologue. First, pro-abortion activist Alison Beck is found murdered, bound to the seat of her car, spiders devouring her body as they spin a galaxy of silver webs throughout her Porsche. Then, utility linemen and construction workers in Maine unearth a pile of darkened bones and skulls. The action subsequently shifts to Boston as former US Senator Jack Mercier hires Parker to investigate the death of Grace Peltier, the daughter of a friend of Mercier’s. The police are satisfied to call the shooting a suicide, but Mercier isn’t. Peltier had written a thesis about the disappearance in 1964 of the Aroostook Baptists, fundamentalists who had founded a colony in Maine. Parker suspects a link to the Fellowship, a religious organization Peltier had contacted shortly before her death as part of her research. The Fellowship blocks Parker’s attempts to interrogate them, as does Elias Pudd, an expert on torture and death by spiders, a grisly subject that Connolly exploits to the point of diminishing effect. Haunted by the murders of his wife and daughter, and taunted by Aroostook ghosts, Parker ponders the evil of vengeful fundamentalists and their perversion of faith, a theme that lends the work heft. Eventually, he deduces that Peltier possessed an object Pudd and other nefarious souls are desperate to retrieve. On a storm-driven night, the investigator pursues them to a coastal island where deadly arachnids crawl everywhere—even from the mouths of living men.

Connolly’s reflections on evil, the past, and reparation are lyrical and affecting, and his grim fundamentalists send off frissons. But the often-languorous narrative lacks tone and modulation.