THE WHITE ROAD

Fourth in the Charlie Parker private-eye series (The Killing Kind, 2002, etc.) by former Dublin journalist Connolly: as ambitiously rich as ever, with lyrically dark watercolors.

The explosive plot, with no shortage of violence or death, takes a deeper cut than most thrillers and gathers moral weight as it moves at its own sweet pace, a pace some will find engaging and others windy. Charlie Parker has left his job as an NYPD detective and relocated in Maine, where he still mourns the death of his wife and daughter (Every Dead Thing, 1999) while living with criminal psychologist Rachel Wolfe, the lover who carries his child. The multiplot includes—from the earlier novel—the disappearance of the Aristook Baptists colony of fundamentalists led by the dastardly Rev. Aaron Faulkner, with Parker’s old cohorts Louis and Angel bringing bloody vengeance to bear on racist evildoers never brought to justice, these also woven into the disappearance of young Cassie Blythe, while in South Carolina Parker becomes involved in the possibly wrongful imprisonment and forthcoming trial of Atys Jones, a 19-year-old black man accused of murdering his rich white girlfriend, Marianne Larousse, by beating her with a rock. Then there’s this mysterious old black Cadillac Coup de Ville that keeps showing up, its door opening in the moonlight as if for a ghost to get in, while down in South Carolina Parker’s lawyer friend, Elliot Norton, who is defending Atys, survives a firebombing. When Faulkner calls Parker to his prison cell, the spooky reverend threatens to kill Rachel unless Parker refuses to testify at his trial. And there’s the racist torturer Kitten, who literally is not human and shimmers in the sun. And the dead Cassie, who visits Parker in the night from the astral darkness where she lies.

So, not your usual thriller. And the payoff comes singing like eelgrass in a stream.