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    Every Dead Thing
    Every Dead Thing
    Every Dead Thing
    Audiobook15 hours

    Every Dead Thing

    Written by John Connolly

    Narrated by Jeff Harding

    4.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Tortured and brilliant private detective Charlie Parker stars in this thriller by New York Times bestselling author John Connolly.

    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: a world 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 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 bickering career criminals, Parker 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, love, and forgiveness. Lyrical and terrifying, it is an ambitious debut, triumphantly realized.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster Audio
    Release dateNov 13, 2012
    ISBN9781442362963
    Every Dead Thing
    Author

    John Connolly

    John Connolly is the author of the #1 internationally bestselling Charlie Parker thrillers series, the supernatural collection Nocturnes, the Samuel Johnson Trilogy for younger readers, and (with Jennifer Ridyard) the Chronicles of the Invaders series. He lives in Dublin, Ireland. For more information, see his website at JohnConnollyBooks.com, or follow him on Twitter @JConnollyBooks.

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    Reviews for Every Dead Thing

    4.5/5

    207 ratings40 reviews

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    • 4/5
      I loved this story. Amazing characters and the plot twists just keep coming. The body count is high and that adds to the suspense as it often seems they every character is expendable. But in the end Bird wins the day though at a great price. The writing is poetic and the dialog spot on. Highly recommended. DP Lyle, award-winning author of the Jake Longly, Samantha Cody, and Dub Walker thriller series

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      John Connolly’s novel, Every Dead Thing, is the story of former NYPD detective Charlie “Bird” Parker, a man who experienced a tragedy of such a large scope that it’s a wonder he didn’t go crazy. While still a homicide detective in New York City and an alcoholic, he had a fight with his wife one night and left the house in anger. He stopped in at the local bar, got drunk, and then returned home several hours late to find that his wife and young daughter had been skinned alive.

      He is first suspected as the killer himself, and even though he is quickly cleared, he's forced out of the department anyway. He is determined to find out who killed his family. He stops drinking and is asked to track down a missing person by a former colleague. Clues eventually lead him to a swamp in Louisiana where he hears rumors of a serial killer known as the Traveling Man, who he now believes killed his family.

      This book has several subplots and is very complex in scope. Connolly consistently maintains the tightly written suspense. Parker and his close friends, gay career criminals Angel and Louis, are filled with just as much darkness as the killers they are looking for. This is an extremely violent book so I definitely can't recommend it to everyone. The story is filled with plenty of corpses and I had to skim several of the passages that documented some of the graphic details.

      I've read every Charlie Parker novel over the years (currently at fourteen books) and it remains one of my favorite series. I've recently decided to revisit them in order by listening to the audiobook versions. I look forward to continuing the series over the next year.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      This book is a pretty great mix of a crime and horror saga. It is not a read for the faint of heart, but it is a real thrill ride for those with a strong constitution. As with any good who-done-it, the end is never quite what and where you expect it.It was only after finishing this book that I realized that this is also the author of "The Book of Lost Things" and "The Gates", both of which I read and enjoyed. This author's writing shows quite a scope of knowledge. He writes with a high degree of authority that comes across well in his novels.Although these genres are not usual choice, I do enjoy the excitement and fantasy that they deliver. I might have to pick up the rest of the Charlie Parker series when life starts to feel a bit stagnant.My thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read and review this title.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      I tend to avoid crime series like the plague unless they are exceptional such as the Jo Nesbo 'Harry Hole' and Kate Atkinson's 'Jackson Brody' series, they have to be intelligent literary fiction for me to want to revisit a character again.

      So for this reason I sniffed at John Connolly's Charlie Parker series under the misapprehension that they were the usual police procedural/serial killer pulp fiction.

      Think it was cloud tags that changed my mind...'Gothic...Maine...Thriller...Occult...Louisiana...Crime Noir...Fallen Angels... what is there not to like!

      Anyway 'Every Dead Thing' is the first in the Charlie Parker series, alcoholic NYPD cop Charlie returns from a late night drinking session to find his wife and daughter murdered, in the most dreadful way imaginable (not for the squeamish) and the die is set for the rest of the series. They were by murdered by the elusive serial killer called 'The Travelling Man'.

      Shocked into sobriety this first book traces Parker's hunt for the his family's killer. The action moves from New York to New Orleans where the novel becomes southern Gothic with a delicious hint of the supernatural. The detail the author goes into may irritate some readers (such as nearly 2 pages on the difference between a male and female skeleton) but I lapped it up.

      This book introduces the supporting cast for the rest of the series such as Louis and Angel, the gay but lethal, assassin and'expert home enterer' respectively, continually bickering and bitching bringing a lighter tone to the overwhelming dark.

      'Fey' is how I would describe Parker ...the definition is 'marked by an otherworldly air or attitude' Connolly is Irish and raised as a Catholic and it is all there in Parker's character...guilt, redemption, atoning for your sins.

      Darkly beautiful and exceptionally well written, elegant and bitter prose.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Suspenseful!!! Highly recommended. ........ ...... ...... ...... ...... ...... ?
    • 3/5
      first line (of the prologue): "It is cold in the car, cold as the grave. I prefer to leave the a/c on full, to let the falling temperature keep me alert."first line (of the first chapter): "The waitress was in her fifties, dressed in a tight black miniskirt, white blouse, and black high heels. Parts of her spilled out of every item of clothing she wore, making her look like she had swollen mysteriously sometime between dressing and arriving for work."The mystery/crime/suspense genre isn't my normal cup of tea. Still, I really enjoyed the other Connolly books I've read -- The Book of Lost Things and especially Nocturnes -- so I thought I'd give his Charlie Parker series a go.It's very dark, though if I couldn't have guessed as much from the title, then I deserved the many moments of squick. Unlike some genre fiction, the writing in Connolly's books is (with the exception of that "cold as the grave" bit) really strong, so I may continue with the series...now and again...when I want to feel horrified.
    • 4/5
      Charlie “Bird” Parker is an ex-cop who left the NYPD in the wake of the double homicide of his wife and daughter. The crime created a cloud of doubt, guilt and suspicion over Parker, who is haunted by ghostly images and memories. Now doing scut detective work for bail bondsman and the like, a former colleague asks him to discreetly look into a probable missing person case which has mob implications, and which takes Parker from New York to Virginia and eventually to pre-Katrina New Orleans.Every Dead Thing is a character study of a grief stricken man who struggles to get his life back on track even as he is unsure of the ground upon which he stands. The action of the novel is carried by two cases which are related by the type of criminals ultimately pursued, serial killers. Some of the victims are children and on the whole the carnage is graphic and gruesome. Acknowledging that the antagonists are the foils against which the protagonists are defined and developed, and that Connolly makes feints at speculating at the natures of the killers, the homicides still have the effect of polarizing the readers into viewing the killers as irredeemably evil and thus rendering the antagonists as as one-dimensional. Richly descriptive detail and with a touch of mysticism, Every Dead Thing is a Southern Gothic tale that evokes some visceral responses and is not for the faint of heart. If you liked the movie, Seven Deadly Sins (starring Brad Pitt, Morgan Freeman, Kevin Spacey, and Gweneth Paltrow) and/or R.J. Ellory’s, A Quiet Belief in Angels, it is likely you will like Every Dead Thing as well.DISCUSSION QUESTIONS: Does a well developed antagonist (e.g. back story, motive understood…) make the antagonist more sympathetic to a reader? Does having a well developed antagonist steal focus from the protagonist, or make for a more balanced (more interesting?) narrative?OTHER: I purchased a mass market paperback edition of Every Dead Thing (Charlie Parker series, Book #1 by John Connolly) form AMZN on February 9, 2013.
    • 3/5
      Not the best start to the reading year! Following a recommendation for Connolly's latest Charlie Parker novel - there are now fifteen in the series - I went back to the beginning to see if I liked the books and the character. I eventually decided that I don't. Charlie Parker is a checklist of detective clichés, the writing is horribly dated, even for the late 90s, and the action - when the author takes time out from describing what everybody is wearing and going on Hugo-esque ruminations about evil - revolves around guns and macho violence. There are also two separate plots crammed into 500 pages, like Connolly couldn't decide which to use and went with both.I will admit that the first chapters, describing the elaborately vicious and grisly murders of Parker's 'wife and child', who were never anything more than a backstory to the main character, hooked me in and kept me reading. The main story is Parker's hunt for the 'Travelling Man', the pretentious serial killer who poses his victims like the subjects of Renaissance anatomical paintings (of course he does). Then there are two vaguely connected subplots about children being abducted and killed in Virginia and a missing woman from Louisiana, which leads Parker to the Travelling Man's lair. The only problem is that Connolly takes what should have been a standard length novel and pumps the pages full of unnecessary descriptions of passing characters and backstory, like Stephen King at his drug-addled best. I started skimming through waffle to get back to the actual plot, or would still be reading this book now.Also, not to sound like a Twitter review, but Connolly has a passive aggressive obsession with portraying black characters and 'homosexuals' as either victims or deviants - apart from the utterly unconvincing pairing of Angel and Louis, who are now regulars of the series. And don't get me started on Rachel, the beautiful and intelligent criminal profiler who joins Parker in Louisiana to look up stuff in books, and naturally falls in love with the tortured yet uber-masculine former detective. I was kind of hoping that she was the Travelling Man, which would have been an epic twist, but I knew who the killer was from the midway mark.Fifteen books testifies to the success of this series, and I hope that Parker's narrative now lives up to the reviews, but this book just wasn't for me, sorry.
    • 3/5
      I am a latecomer to the long-running series Charlie Parker and I confess I don’t care for them much. This is the third I've read, although chronologically it is the first. My main complaint is that these books are too long for this class of story; too many episodes throw off the pace. And I can't take in the need to bring the supernatural into what are basically detective thrillers. Why?I received a review copy of "Every Dead Thing: A Charlie Parker Thriller" by John Connolly (Atria) through NetGalley.com.
    • 4/5
      Definitely the most gory and grotesque beginning to any book I have ever read. Do not start reading this while you are eating. I seriously thought it was going to be a DNF. There were a few moments when my eyes started to cross and my mind started to wander. Thankfully, those were very few. For the most part, I found this book to be very edge of my seat. The suspects for the "Traveling Man" were many and my finger pointed at a lot of them. Some of the time when I was reading the book, I was wondering, "how the heck does this tie in?". Then at the end when the author put in the red arrows and the blinking lights along with the sirens, I was like I would have never figured that out.The story took me from New York, up to the East Coast, to Virginia and down to the Big Easy. Charlie Parker provided many chuckles as well as his friends, Louis and Angel. So basically, the author added everything. Entertainment, mystery, suspense, gore, action scenes, scenery, high speed chases, the "don't go into the basement scenes", a few swampland scenes and some good ole Bayou voodoo. Not to mention the Cajun delicacies enjoyed by the characters.This was a great story and definitely held my interest. This was one serial killer you did not want to meet in a dark alley. Thanks to Atria Books for approving my request and to Net Galley for providing me with a free e-galley in exchange for an honest review.
    • 4/5
      Charlie Parker lost his wife and daughter by the hand of a killer. He took away their skins and insides and he's not finish with toying with Parker. Not only is he tryinh to find the killer but also have to solve the dissapearance of a woman.

      Great suspense thriller. The author describs every little detail, some gory. I enjoyed it very much.
    • 5/5
      I picked this book up because it mentioned New Orleans in the blurb on the back. I was disappointed that it seemed to take place primarily in New York. I understood why in the end and how all that tied in to the pursuit and extremely climactic ending! Believe me....this is a sleeper that ends with a bang! I'm glad I read it.
    • 3/5
      Interesting and well-written, but a bit too gory for my tastes.
    • 5/5
      It's really hard to believe this is a first novel. It's so crammed with characters and plots, it's amazing. Charlie "Bird" Parker was an NYPD Detective when his wife and daughter were tortured, skinned and murdered. And, his life wasn't great even before that. It spins beyond out of control as he weaves his way towards finding the monster who did it. This book has it all from the gruesome to the curious to the amazing.
    • 5/5
      Charlie Parker is one of my favorite characters in the book world. This is my third time around listening to the entire series.
    • 4/5
      i really enjoyed this book, it was definately a bright beginning as a first novel and i love series' so im excited that the charlie parker saga continues and so far its all just as good if not better.Alot of this reminds of the P.I. books on Kenzi and Gennaro (probably why i like it so much)
    • 3/5
      This is John Connolly's first novel and like many first novels there are some obvious flaws. But one thing you can't accuse Connolly of, is lack of ambition. He begins his first novel with a serial killer killing and cutting the faces off the main protagonist, Charllie "Bird" Parker's, wife and 3 year old child in their kitchen while the Parker is out getting drunk at a bar down the road. But Connolly does not just settle for one serial killer, Parker has to track down and solve an old murder case involving the Mafia and a second serial killer that escaped the police several years earlier. This takes the first half of the book and then somewhat clumsily leads to Parker getting information from a voodoo woman in Louisiana about the man that killed his wife and child. Connolly brings in several characters to help Parker and he confronts competing drug lords in lower Louisiana as well as possible ghosts and a metaphysical angle where the killer is trying to teach everyone, but especially Parker, the nature of death by using old, obscure anatomy text books from the 18th century to dissect the bodies of the people he is killing. Some of these elements John Connolly does better than others but it is the sheer number of elements that he has put in his first novel that is noteworthy. The solving of the first set of murders is relatively straight forward and is more satisfying as a mystery than the second part of the book. But it is the second part of the book that is personally important to Parker and so the first serial killer is in some ways distracting to the overall flow of the book. The interjection of the supernatural/ horror elements in the second part of the book slow down the plot and the metaphysical angle of why the serial killer is killing everyone is a little far fetched. But the second part of the book , even with its flaws, develops an energy and tension that is dark and compelling. Connolly has a lot of good things in his first novel, the problem in some ways is that he has just too many things in the novel (including numerous discriptions of what everyone is wearing).
    • 2/5
      The writing was good (although I had trouble keeping track of the characters). However it was over-the-top gory for no good reason. The writing was good enough that I wanted to read through to the end, but then I was sorry I spent the time putting such yuk in my brain. I really liked his Book of Lost Things, which is why I tried this.
    • 4/5
      The First but not the last in the Charlie Parker series. At first, I was not sure I was going to like it but it has grown on me so that I will continue to enjoy his exploits. Death really does follow him!



    • 4/5
      What a real page-turner of a novel. Disturbing, deep, gripping with a stunning climax - I was rooted to the book until I finished it.Back Cover Blurb:Former New York detective Charlie Parker is the father of a murdered daughter and husband to a murdered wife.The Travelling Man is an artist of death, making human bodies his canvas and taking faces as his prize.Now another girl is missing....Dogged by terror and driven by rage, through the swamps of America's darkest underbelly, Parker pursues his man and his revenge.And sometimes, nothing is more shocking than the truth.
    • 4/5
      a great read
    • 4/5
      I can't believe I've never read John Connolly before! I will be devouring more as soon as possible!
    • 5/5
      Recommended by a coworker, who was damn right. Charlie Parker (no relation) is a former detective whose wife and daughter are brutally tortured and murdered by a deviant Parker comes to call the Traveling Man. After some time away, he's come back to NY (now as a PI) on a case and is drawn into a missing person case that leads him to horrible crimes of years ago in the south. But the Traveling Man has not stopped during this interlude. In fact, it seems as if he's escalating. So Parker heads down to New Orleans on a lead. And the Traveling Man knows.
    • 5/5
      The first in the excellent, and excellently creepy, Charlie Parker series, that blends hard-nosed modern violent crime with earie supernatural for a page turning read that will stay with you for a long while.
    • 4/5
      Finally, a character to replace Jack Reacher. Charlie kicks butt, does what needs doing and saves the day (well, sorta). Just what I was looking for.Would I have preferred less metaphysical/spiritual gibberish? sure... but I'll take it like it is because finally there's a protagonist who isn't a wimp, an active drunkard moaning about his drunken past, or a war vet scarred for life by having had to blow up someone at war. Sure, bad stuff has happened to Charlie but instead of having segments of the story devoted to him "overcoming" it a la Oprah style, he just gets on with it and does what needs to be done. If that involves pounding the stuffing outa some junkyard dropping, so be it.The drawback to this book is that it has two complete stories in it so you think you're just at the middle of the book but the story you've been following is suddenly resolved - then a whole new story starts up. Seriously, it's literally two complete stories in one book. Of course, the plot of the second story is begun at the start of the book, but... a lot of series books do that and just continue the protagonist's journey in the next book. It seems as though Connolly didn't realize when he wrote this that there would be a series in which he could resolve Charlie's issues. I guess this isn't a big drawback but... I like my stories to wrap up so I can get on to the next book, not restart in the middle.
    • 3/5
      A lot of themes. Almost 2 separate serial killer novels. Artistic dissection on drugged but conscious bodies.
    • 2/5
      I had trouble keeping track of the characters in this book. Never finished reading it.
    • 4/5
      This story opens with Charlie Parker standing over the bodies of his wife and child, cruely murdered. Charlie has to watch as the police take over the investigation. But he cannot stand by idly, he can get involved, and he does. He chases down the psychopath who killed them, with a variety of twists and turns.I did find it facinating, it was almost two stories that intertwined and made sense in the end. I look forward to more in this series.
    • 5/5
      Great read. Tough to keep up with how it all ties together in the end, but stick with it anyway b/c it’s gripping & captivating.
    • 4/5
      This was one of the most atmospheric, detailed books I’ve read in a long time. The mood just drips off the page and at times it felt I was following Parker, just a step or two behind. The story builds slowly and sometimes feels as if maybe a touch more editing could have been done, but really the story and characters are to engrossing to let this be a hindrance. The touches of supernatural also add a layer of mystery to the novel. Love this book.