Have faith. I will find you.
Former NYPD detective Charlie "Bird" Parker is on the verge of madness. Tortured by the unsolved slayings of his wife and young daughter, he is a man consumed by guilt, regret, and the desire for revenge.
When his former partner asks him to track down a missing girl, Parker finds himself drawn into a world beyond his imagining—one where thirty-year-old killings remain shrouded in fear and lies, a world where the ghosts of the dead torment the living, a world haunted by the murderer responsible for the deaths in his family, a serial killer unlike any other, a monster who uses the human body to create works of art and takes faces as his prize. But the search awakens buried instincts in Parker: instincts for survival, for compassion, for love, and, ultimately, for killing.
Aided by a beautiful young psychologist and a pair of career criminals, he becomes the bait in a trap set in the humid bayous of Louisiana, a trap that threatens the lives of everyone in its reach. Driven by visions of the dead and the voice of an old black psychic who met a terrible end, Parker must seek a final, brutal confrontation with a murderer who has moved beyond all notions of humanity, who has set out to create a hell on earth: the serial killer known only as the Traveling Man.
In the tradition of classic American detective fiction, Every Dead Thing is a tense, richly-plotted thriller, filled with memorable characters and gripping action. It is also a profoundly moving novel, concerned with the nature of loyalty, of love, and of forgiveness. Lyrical and terrifying, it is an ambitious debut, triumphantly realized.
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"When NYPD detective Charlie Parker comes home from a night of binge drinking to find his wife and child murdered and skinned by a sadistic serial killer, his life is turned upside down. Leaving the police force and bottle behind, he takes on some under the table private eye work, but his real mission is to track down the killer. When a lead in the case takes Parker to the swamps of Louisiana, he is accompanied by his lethal friends Angel and Louis and the brilliant criminal psychologist Rachel. While in the bayous, the sadistic murders continue and Parker is also trapped in a gang war between two rival factions who may unwittingly have information about the identity of the killer. Like all books in this excellent series, there is a light touch of the supernatural in this story, with Parker sensing the spirits of his wife and daughter, and being contacted in a dream by one of the murder victims. But don't let that scare away fans of straight ahead crime fiction, as most of the book centers on a frantic chase between Parker and friends, the local police and the FBI to find the killer. This is the opening book in the continuously excellent Charlie Parker series. Elements of extremely graphic violence make this a melding of crime and horror fiction with a hard-boiled veneer of the great private eye stories."
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Tim (5 out of 5 stars)