I just finished John Connolly's award-winning debut novel,
EVERY DEAD THING. Despite its many strengths, I was
disappointed.
Largely, I think it was a matter of having too disjointed a
plot, and being too long. The hero, private eye Charlie
"Bird" Parker, is on the trail of a serial killer called "The
Traveling Man" who viciously murdered Parker's wife and
daughter. In the meantime, he's taking on a variety of PI
cases in and around NYC, not because he needs the money, but
just to keep busy in between following leads on his family's
murder. One of these is a missing persons case that takes up
the first half of the book and puts him on the trail of a
completely different serial killer.
Once he's cleared up that case (which takes up roughly the
first half of the novel), he gets a lead on his wife's case
and is immediately off to New Orleans with his version of the
"psycho sidekick" (or "sicekicks since there are two of them,
a professional burglar and a black, politically conservative
hit man who are a gay couple) to follow it up.
To begin with, the first half of the book is so imperfectly
connected to the second half that I think it would have
worked better if the two halves had just been published as
two separate novels. And since the book's about 400 pages
long, that still would have made for two fairly substantial,
if appealingly tight, books.
Secondly, the identity of his family's killer was pretty
obvious to me fairly early on.
Finally, the "rescue-of-the-heroine" scene at the end, while
not badly done, still had an odor of contrivance about
it.
Still, Connolly writes well and one thing I've got to give
him full credit for, since he's Irish, is that he writes
convincingly American. So many writers from the British Isles
have done such a bad job trying to write American-style crime
novels, that someone who gets it so right deserves to have it
pointed out (of course, Connolly's Irish, not British, and
everyone knows that the Irish have such a superlative
ear).
The only false note I heard was when he referred to a
character as a "junior school" teacher, by which I suppose he
meant a "junior HIGH school" teacher.
Next up, Michael Connelly's CITY OF BONES.
JIM DOHERTY
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