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The Unquiet

by John Connolly

Hodder & Stoughton, HK$247

An Irishman through and through,  John Connolly sets almost all his novels in rural Maine, in northeastern America.  He also   has a Maine travel guide on his personal website, listing his favourite hotels and tourist spots. As if that's not enough,  he  shares a web forum with his  readers and devotes entire sections to writing and publishing tips.

Stephen King favours New England  for his horror novels, and Connolly's thrillers, centred  on the violent and flawed private detective Charlie Parker ('like the saxophonist'), carry that same whiff of the grave. But with Connolly's work you get the alcoholism, the violence, the marriage break-ups, the  fisticuffs and seedy villains you might associate with a modern-day Raymond Chandler. It's just bolted on to  a  spooky under-plot.

In the case of The Unquiet,  that sense of creeping unreality unfurls slowly. A man  at war with his own demons (a dead wife and child), Parker is drawn into a web of deceit and lies surrounding a paedophile ring.

Hired to track down a missing psychologist, Daniel Clay, who once treated abused children, Parker soon becomes mired in a dark world of half-truths and possible killers.  He's also going through another marriage break-up. In the sleepy but mean Maine ports, Parker must fight for his  sanity and relationships, and expose some of the most powerful members of its society.

Into this mixture steps the grim, eerily intense ex-convict, Merrick, just released from a  high-security prison and hunting his daughter's abductors. A hired killer, he's relentless in his pursuit of the kidnappers:  a delicious invention by Connolly. And the paedophiles Parker gradually comes to suspect are responsible  will stop at nothing to protect their secrets. As the action races through beautifully evoked rural Maine, Parker and his strange companions (a pair  of gay bodyguards) must overcome both natural and supernatural enemies.

The mysterious and enigmatic Collector lies at the heart of the story, and his arrival heralds woe: 'It should have brought with it the smell of the sea, but it did not. Instead, there was only the scent of burning, stronger now, and then that faded, to be replaced  by a dry stench, as of a hole in the ground that had recently been opened to reveal  the hunched, wretched thing lying dead  in the earth.'

The Unquiet is littered with such rich language. Every character is painted in intimate detail: for example, a high-society wife has 'skin like molded plastic ... her surgeon had carved her mouth into a permanent half-smile, so that someone could have been telling her about the systematic drowning of puppies and kittens and she would merely have looked slightly amused at the whole affair'.

It's not every detective novel that penetrates deep into the murky world of abuse. Credit to Connolly for his willingness to tackle this difficult topic, and for the depth of his research. The Unquiet  has pace, rich description and a tortured, compelling, central character - a rare achievement in  a novel that crosses genres.



The Unquiet