Charlie Parker returns in The Instruments of Darkness, by John Connolly, the twenty-first book in the series. Parker has been bruised and battered by his work as a private investigator, but he can’t stop when there’s a chance that he can take a measure of evil out of the world. Evil is absolutely real for Parker. He can sense the presence of supernatural evil when it begins to infect our world. It’s a wonder Parker can still joke. This entry in the series sees Parker taking on two evils: a child murderer and a pack of neo-Nazis.
The client this time is Colleen Clark, a passive and damaged woman accused of killing her toddler son, Henry. Henry’s body hasn’t been recovered but a bloody blanket was recovered from the Clarks’ garage. Parker’s old friend, Moxie Castin, who is defending Colleen, calls him in to try and find out what really happened to the boy. An early meeting with Colleen convinces Parker that Colleen is not only innocent but that something sinister is going on with her weirdly affectless husband—a husband who was far too quick to throw his wife under the bus.
Fans of the series will be pleased to see old friends show up to help: the Fulci brothers, Louis and Angel. I’m not so sure, however, that they will be thrilled by the muddled plot. Much of the first half of the book centers on the investigation into the Clarks and what happened to their son. I was intrigued by the shadowy figure of Mara Teller, a woman who is strangely hard to track down after it’s revealed that she had an affair with Henry’s father. Why would a woman create an identity and pay for a money order to get into a petrochemical conference just to seduce Stephen Clark? What’s up with the mysterious plot of land “Mara” is tracked to that everyone in the community avoids? In the second half of The Instruments of Darkness, Parker et al. are surprised by the reappearance of an old enemy, who takes the opportunity to instigate a bizarre firebombing of Colleen’s house. I was very confused by this addition, especially since I was sufficiently interested in learning what happened to Henry and if Colleen would be successfully railroaded into a prison sentence.
I might’ve been more forgiving of the overstuffed plot if I hadn’t kept seeing British-isms in the dialogue of a bunch of American characters. It was little things like people being phoned instead of called. Connolly is Irish but I don’t remember his books about Parker and his crew being so inauthentic with their vocabularies. I recognize this as a pet peeve of mine. That said, I hope there’s time for someone familiar with American English to do some swaps.