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The Reapers: A Charlie Parker Thriller, by John Connolly
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A brilliantly chilling novel by New York Times bestselling author John Connolly about a chain of killings, linked obscurely by great distances and the passage of years, and the settling of their blood-debts -- past, present, and future.
As a small boy, Louis witnesses an unspeakable crime that takes the life of a member of his small, southern community. He grows up and moves on, but he is forever changed by the cruel and brutal nature of the act. It lights a fire deep within him that burns white and cold, a quiet flame just waiting to ignite. Now, years later, the sins of his life are reaching into his present, bringing with them the buried secrets and half-forgotten acts of his past.
Someone is hunting him, targeting his home, his businesses, and his partner, Angel. The instrument of revenge is Bliss, a killer of killers, the most feared of assassins. Bliss is a Reaper, a lethal tool to be applied toward the ultimate end, but he is also a man with a personal vendetta.
Hardened by their pasts, Louis and Angel decide to strike back. While they form a camaraderie that brings them solace, it offers them no shelter from the fate that stalks them. When they mysteriously disappear, their friends are forced to band together to find them. They are led by private detective Charlie Parker, a killer himself, a Reaper in waiting.
Connolly's triumphant prose and unerring rendering of his tortured characters mesmerize and chill. He creates a world where everyone is corrupt, murderers go unpunished, but betrayals are always avenged. Yet another masterpiece from a proven talent, The Reapers will terrify and transfix.
- Sales Rank: #599259 in Books
- Published on: 2008-05-27
- Released on: 2008-05-27
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.00" h x 1.20" w x 6.00" l, 1.18 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 368 pages
Review
"Connolly has crafted one of the most darkly intriguing books this reviewer has encountered in more than three decades of reading crime fiction.... To call this a page-turner is to damn it with faint praise. Veteran crime fans will want to savor every note-perfect word. " -- Booklist (Starred review)
About the Author
John Connolly is the author of the Charlie Parker series of mystery novels, the supernatural collection Nocturnes, the Samuel Johnson Trilogy, and (with Jennifer Ridyard) the Chronicles of the Invaders series for younger readers. He lives in Dublin, Ireland. For more information, see his website at JohnConnollyBooks.com, or follow him on Twitter @JConnollyBooks.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter One
There are so many killings, so many victims, so many lives lost and ruined every day, that it can be hard to keep track of them all, hard to make the connections that might bring cases to a close. Some are obvious: the man who kills his girlfriend, then takes his own life, either out of remorse or because of his own inability to face the consequences of his actions; or the tit-for-tat murders of hoodlums, gangsters, drug dealers, each killing leading inexorably to another as the violence escalates. One death invites the next, extending a pale hand in greeting, grinning as the ax falls, the blade cuts. There is a chain of events that can easily be reconstructed, a clear trail for the law to follow.
But there are other killings that are harder to connect, the links between them obscured by great distances, by the passage of years, by the layering of this honeycomb world as time folds softly upon itself.
The honeycomb world does not hide secrets: it stores them. It is a repository of buried memories, of half-forgotten acts.
In the honeycomb world, everything is connected.
* * *
The St. Daniil sat on Brightwater Court, not far from the cavernous dinner clubs on Brighton Beach Avenue and Coney Island Avenue where couples of all ages danced to music in Russian, Spanish, and English, ate Russian food, shared vodka and wine, and watched stage shows that would not have been out of place in some of the more modest Reno hotels, or on a cruise ship, yet the St. Daniil was far enough away from them to render itself distinct in any number of ways. The building that it occupied overlooked the ocean, and the boardwalk with its principal trio of restaurants, the Volna, the Tatiana, and the Winter Garden, now screened to protect their patrons from the cool sea breeze and the stinging sands. Nearby was the Brighton playground, where, during the day, old men sat at stone tables playing cards while children cavorted nearby, the young and the not-so-young united together in the same space. New condos had sprung up to the east and west, part of the transformation that Brighton Beach had undergone in recent years.
But the St. Daniil belonged to an older dispensation, a different Brighton Beach, one occupied by the kind of businesses that made their money from those who were on nodding terms with poverty: check-cashing services that took 25 percent of every check cashed, then offered loans at a similar monthly rate to cover the shortfall; discount stores that sold cheap crockery with cracked glaze, and firetrap Christmas decorations all year round; former mom-and-pop grocery stores that were now run by the kind of men who looked like they might have the remains of mom and pop rotting in their cellars; laundromats frequented by men who smelt of the streets and who would routinely strip down to filthy shorts and sit, nearly naked, waiting for their clothes to wash before giving them a single desultory spin in the dryer (for every quarter counted) and then dress in the still-damp clothes, folding the rest into plastic garbage bags and venturing back onto the streets, their garments steaming slightly in the air; pawnshops that did a steady trade in redeemed and unredeemed items, for there was always someone willing to benefit from the misfortune of another; and storefronts with no name above the window and only a battered counter inside, the shadowy business conducted within of no interest to those who needed to be told its nature. Most of those places were gone now, relegated to side streets, to less desirable neighborhoods, pushed farther and farther back from the avenue and the sea, although those who needed their services would always know where to find them.
The St. Daniil remained, though. It endured. The St. Daniil was a club, although it was strictly private and had little in common with its glitzier counterparts on the avenue. Accessed through a steel-caged door, it occupied the basement of an old brownstone building surrounded by other brownstones of similar vintage although, while its neighbors had been cleaned up, the edifice occupied by the St. Daniil had not. It had once formed the main entrance to a larger complex, but changes to the internal structure of the buildings had isolated the St. Daniil between two significantly more attractive apartment blocks. The club's home now squatted in the middle of them like some poor relation that had muscled in on a family photo, unashamed of its ignominy.
Above the St. Daniil was a warren of small apartments, some big enough to be occupied by entire families, others small enough to accommodate only an individual, and one, at that, for whom space mattered less than privacy and anonymity. Nobody lived in those apartments now, not willingly. Some were used for storage: booze, cigarettes, electrical goods, assorted contraband. The rest acted as temporary quarters for young -- sometimes very young -- prostitutes and, when required, their clients. One or two of the rooms were marginally better furnished and maintained than others, and contained video cameras and recording equipment for the making of pornographic films.
Although it was known as the St. Daniil, the club did not have an official name. A plate beside the door read "Private Members Social Club" in English and Cyrillic, but it was not the kind of place where anyone went to be sociable. There was a bar there, but few lingered at it, and those who did stuck mostly to coff ee and killed time while waiting for errands to run, vig to collect, bones to break. A TV above the bar showed pirated DVDs, old hockey games, sometimes porn or, late at night, when all business had been conducted, film of Russian troops in Chechnya engaging in reprisals against their enemies, real or perceived. Worn hemispherical vinyl booths lined the walls, with scuff ed tables at their center, relics of a time when this really was a social club, a place where men could talk of the old country and share the newspapers that had arrived in the mail or in the suitcases of visitors and immigrants. The decor consisted mainly of framed copies of Soviet posters from the 1940s, bought for five bucks at RBC Video on Brighton Beach Avenue.
For a time, the police had kept watch on the club, but they had been unable to access it in order to plant a bug, and a wiretap on the phones had expired without anything useful being learned. Any business of consequence was, they suspected, now conducted on throwaway cellphones, the phones replaced religiously at the end of every week. Two raids by vice on the building through the doorway above the club had scored only a couple of johns and a handful of weary whores, few of whom had English and fewer of whom had papers. No pimps were ever apprehended, and the women, the cops knew, were easily replaced.
On those nights, the door to the St. Daniil had remained firmly closed, and when the cops finally gained entry to it they had found only a bored bartender and a pair of ancient, toothless Russians playing poker for matchsticks.
It was a mid-October evening. The light outside had long faded and only a single booth in the club was occupied. The man seated there was a Ukrainian known as the Priest. He had studied in an Orthodox seminary for three years before discovering his true vocation, which lay primarily in providing the kinds of services for which priests were usually required to off er forgiveness. The club's unofficial name was a testament to the Priest's brief flirtation with the religious life. The St. Daniil monastery was Moscow's oldest cloister, a stronghold of the Orthodox faith even during the worst excesses of the Communist era, when many of its priests had become martyrs and the remains of St. Daniil himself had been smuggled to America in order to save them from harm.
Unlike many of those who worked for him, the Priest spoke English with hardly a trace of an accent. He had been part of the first influx of immigrants from the Soviet Union, working hard to learn the ways of this new world, and he could still recall a time when Brighton Beach had been nothing but old people living in rent-controlled apartments surrounded by little vacant houses falling into decay, a far cry from the days when this area was a beacon for immigrants and New Yorkers alike anxious to leave the crowded neighborhoods of Brownsville, East New York, and Manhattan's Lower East Side for space in which to live and the feel of sea air in their lungs. He prided himself on his sophistication. He read the Times, not the Post. He went to the theater. When he was in his realm, there was no porn on the TV, no poorly copied DVDs. Instead, it was tuned to BBC World, or sometimes CNN. He did not like Fox News. It looked inward, and he was a man who was always looking at the greater world outside. He drank tea during the day, and only compote, a fruit punch that tasted of plums, at night. He was an ambitious man, a prince who wished to become a king. He paid obeisance to the old men, the ones who had been imprisoned under Stalin, the ones whose fathers had created the criminal enterprise that had now reached its zenith in a land far from their own. But even as he bowed before them, the Priest looked for ways in which they might be undermined. He calculated the strength of potential rivals among his own generation and prepared his people for the inevitable bloodshed, sanctioned or unsanctioned, that would come. Recently, there had been some reversals. The mistakes might have been avoided, but he was not entirely to blame for them. Unfortunately, there were others who did not see it that way. Perhaps, he thought, the bloodshed would have to begin sooner than expected.
Today had been a bad day, another in a succession of bad days. There had been a problem with the restrooms that morning and the place still stank, even though the diffi culty had apparently been solved once the drain people, from a fi rm trusted by the organization, got on the case. On another day, the Priest might well have left the club and gone elsewhere, but there was business to be conducted and loose ends to be tied...
Most helpful customer reviews
64 of 71 people found the following review helpful.
Reapers Creepers
By Tom H
I would begin by saying that I've read as much of John Connolly's published work as found available. That includes: all of the Charlie Parker novels, The Book of Lost Things, and Nocturnes (Mister Connolly's outstanding anthology of short stories, of which the tale The New Daughter, from the short story of the same name, receives a retelling in the form of a soon to be released motion picture starring Kevin Costner and Ivana Banquero, the beguiling daughter in Pan's Labyrinth).
This stand alone novel is every bit as engrossing as the other tales involving Charlie Parker, erstwhile NYPD Detective and guilt ridden (while otherwise occupied) survivor of the butchery that claimed his wife and daughter. Thing is... this latest volume does not focus on the character of Charlie Parker so much as it concentrates on his friends, and sometime accomplices and cohorts, Louis and Angel.
Both of these characters figure large in novels concerning PI Charlie Parker. But not much has been issued by way of explaining their genesis (and especially Louis). All of that territory is covered in this distinct volume (and with barely so much as an utterance, and even less of a presence, of Charlie Parker).
To mention much of the story would be to mention a lot. Let's just say that it is a tale of menace and authority, and of retribution and reaction, and of hunters being hunted. There is much room here for betrayal and false starts turning into dead ends turning into blind corners, the likes of which you should be ever mindful of turning.
Bottom line is the fact that, as always, Mr. Connolly does not disappoint. He has a certain knack for providing lyricism midst chaos and with ever the ear for crisply delivered dialogue delivered as if it were being spoken directly. There is also the proper amount of hyperbole, injected whenever needed, while providing pause within the context of whatever background information is being provided. That said, Mr. Connolly is a master at pacing his stories and at always providing the proper mix of `telling and showing'.
If you enjoyed the previous Charlie Parker novels, and hunger for more of the same, you can't go wrong. And if you are new to the `crime' scene and seeking something other than hammered phrasing and rat-a-tat-prose, you are in for a treat.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Another Homer He Hits!
By Amazon Customer
I like the series, period. All his books are good; they form the part of a whole. What differentiates "The Reapers" is that the spotlight gets trained on the supporting cast and that's good since CP's buddies and sidekicks, along with some pretty exotic baddies, hold one's attention. Still the Detective did show up for the grand finale. With John Connolly, you just can't read one. Stephen King, watch out. Is there room in Maine for both of you--or in the most forlorn spots of grim and grimy New England?
35 of 37 people found the following review helpful.
not the usual Parker thriller, but. . .
By Gabriela Perez
Before I say anything else, I will tell you that I am a great fan of Mr. Connolly's Charlie Parker series. In fact, I'm a huge fan of all of Mr. Connolly's writing. My fondness for his books stems from the simple fact that I have found them all incredibly satisfying reads. Not a one has ever disappointed me, and lest you think I'm a blindly enthusiastic fan, I'll tell you that I fully expected NOT to like this one as much as the others, or at least to like it for a whole slew of different reasons.
I'd read that this book was focused on Louis and Angel (Charlie Parker's homicidal, hilarious, homosexual "sidekicks"); I'd read that Parker played only a peripheral role here. So, being the huge Parker fan that I am, I wondered if I'd find this read as satisfying or as well-written when it focused on two people whose dark natures were, at least to me, so much more developed and hard to deny.
I needn't have worried. I finished it in record time and was well-pleased with the book as a whole.
Parker does indeed play a peripheral role. He probably appears in less than 1/6 of the book, and only in a reversal of his usual place in things. He's the Angel/Louis here. He's the one who comes in when trouble hits, but whose character is basically secondary throughout except as it affects other characters (in fact, he is referred to as "the Detective" throughout most of the pages upon which he appears, the result of being seen primarily through the eyes of Willie Brew).
The result of Parker's relative absence is a lighter book, even when it covers the darkest of topics. Parker, you see, might have his funny moments, but his is a tortured spirit. He does terrible things, usually for all the right reasons, but the terrible nature of what he feels compelled to do is never far from him. As a result, spending time with him is often exhausting, sometimes depressing, always thought-provoking. I have loved every Parker book, but I'm not blind to the spiritual challenge reading about him puts before me.
One of the reasons I believe Angel and Louis are so popular is that they can do terrible things as well, but the moral toughness doesn't swallow them whole, doesn't cling to them the way it does to Parker. Their humor, their banter, their cool loyalty--these are all appealing to so many of us.
In this book, we get a lot of background that I, for one, have long wanted. How did Louis become a hired killer? How clearly does Angel see his partner and the violence he holds within him? And, just as important in a National Enquirer kind of way: what kind of life do Louis and Angel live when they're not backing Parker up in some guns-a-blazing way? Do they have any other friends, for crying out loud? Why on earth does Angel wear such incredibly awful clothes? How do he and Angel reconcile their vastly different musical tastes? Does Louis really have such contempt for his partner's humor and clothing?
As Louis tries to deal with a threat on his and his loved ones' lives (and yes, believe it or not, there is more than one loved one in his life, although you won't ever hear him admitting it), we learn about his relationship to his "handler," Gabriel. We learn a bit more about the love Louis and Angel hold for each other (although there's nothing explicit here, folks; I don't imagine we'll ever get taken into that territory by Mr. Connolly, and that's a good thing, in my opinion; the story of these two men isn't, I don't think, one that would show up in the gay equivalent of a Harlequin romance).
More than anything, I really enjoyed the fact that Parker gets to explain a bit about himself without. . .well, without all that angst. His is a (deceptively) simple life here (when this novel begins, Parker has lost his PI license and is tending bar, his personal life still in a kind of limbo), the ultimate role reversal, as I said before.
The novel includes some really tough scenes and some hard-to-stomach history (that's one of Mr. Connolly's strongest skills--his research, and the way he weaves history into his stories--wow) about sundown towns, but this book is far less bleak than the other seven in this series. Usually, the history we get is tied to something that will affect Parker directly, that will in some way add to his moral burden or flesh out (no pun intended) some part of the mystery he's trying to solve in that given book. The result of this is often an oppressive weight, and I can honestly say that I rarely find myself happy at the end of a Parker book; there's just been so much weighing on my spirit as well throughout. Not so here. I do feel the weight of the history that defined who Louis is (both as a black man and as a killer), but it's just. . .different.
Overall--I really enjoyed this. Pick it up, especially if you're a Louis and Angel fan. If you're more a Charlie Parker fan, pick it up so that you can see him through different eyes.
Enjoy!
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