Every dead thing. John Connolly. 1999.

‘I could find her if I chose. I found the others, but they were dead when I found them.’

Hauntes by the unsolved slays of his wife and young daughter, and tormented by his sense of guilt, former New York City detective Charlie ‘Bird’ Parker is a man consumed by violence, regret and the desire for revenge.

The Bird’s ex-partner asks him to track down a missing girl and Bird embarks on an odyssey that is to lead him into the bowels of organised crime; to an old black woman who dwells by the Louisiana swamps; to cellars of torture and death; and to a serial killer unlike any other, an artist who uses the human body as his canvas and takes faces as his prized a killer known only as The Travelling Man. 

Steeped in the best traditions of classic American crime fiction, John Connolly’s stunning first novel pushes back the frontiers of the genre. Complexly plotted, richly textured, with memorable characters and a profoundly moral dimension, it is an ambitious debut, triumphantly realised.