Synopsis
Two intertwined disappearances leave a rural community in shock in the latest gripping Charlie Parker novel from New York Times bestselling author John Connolly.
In a darkly brilliant thriller set in Maine’s rural Kennebec River Valley, the body of a young runaway from a “troubled teens” school has been found in the water, seemingly drowned, while a teenage girl has gone missing, believed dead. Now it is up to one man, private investigator Charlie Parker, to find the connection, and bring two evils—one new and one ancient—to an end…
Review
Maine PI Charlie Parker returns for his twenty-third outing in John Connolly’s A River Red With Blood. This time around, Parker and Connolly square-off against the troubled-teen industry.
Imprisoned father Ward Vose hires Parker via an attorney to investigate the death of his son, Scott Theriault, whose corpse was found in the Kennebec River. Theriault, it’s posited, ran away from the Spero School – a behavior modification joint for at-risk teens whose parents can’t deal with them anymore – and rather than flee toward civilization went several miles deeper into the woods, broke his leg and drowned. Vose doesn’t buy the official story and Parker finds himself compelled to assist the grieving father, especially as news grows of a missing girl, Mallory Norton, who may have been linked to Theriault.
Connolly layers in additional complications, as well, like a group of twisted killers who participate in what they The Game. We’re introduced to them during a hunt for their next victim in Detroit. I have to say, as a metro-Detroiter, it’s always nice to see some Michigan representation and familiar locales getting unexpectedly name-dropped in this Maine-centric series from an Irish author! Meanwhile, further east, professional hitman and Parker confidante, Louis, learns of a hit that’s been placed on him.
And then there’s the wrinkle of old memories resurfacing in Parker’s mind, and dreams shared by Louis and Angel, of lives that may not be their own… These minor hints at notions of reincarnation serve to deepen the mythology underpinning this long-running series, as well as the relationship between Parker and his unlikely allies. Painting these figures as lost souls bound to one another across time and space gives this overarching mythos some added philosophical weight, as well, not to mention some minor shades of Roland’s own ka-tet in Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series. Parker’s reflections on these new dimensions of his relationship to those around him draws on French thinkers and musings on masculine emotion and love, reminding us of just how well read both Parker and Connolly are. If Parker isn’t already the heir apparent to Robert B. Parker’s Boston gumshoe, Spenser, he’s certainly in the running.
While A River Red With Blood is smart, smart-mouthed, and literate, it’s also grisly in its depiction of life within the academic halls of the metaphorically and possibly literally haunted Spero. Much like Tananarive Due’s excellent historical horror book, The Reformatory, Connolly reminds us of the real-life terrors these types of schools and their “tough love” approach to remodeling children’s behavior are best known for. Students are pitted against one another, and the school itself is run on a hierarchy of sociopathy. There’s little to distinguish these academies from juvenile detention centers, making them hardly more than prisons with a school curriculum for tortured youths.
Like all good, long-lasting crime and horror fiction, Connolly uses his work to hold up an empathetic mirror to society. That so much focus lies on child detention facilities by another name and the abusive, sociopathic officials running them, in our era of prison industrial complexes and ICE sweeps to abduct and disappear immigrants and their children, not to mention US citizens, hardly feels coincidental. Connolly makes direct note of this, even, as Maine has been pushed into a climate of government-created and mandated fear by overreaching federal immigration taskforces running amok and terrorizing communities, and reminding us of the hard and harsh realities of life as an inmate for both Vose and, by extension, his son. As Connolly reminds us, if the system can get away with doing it to the weak – like poor immigrant laborers and children – eventually it’ll get around to doing it to you, too. Just ask Alex Peretti and Renee Nicole Good.
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