By John Connolly

Hodder, out now

The search for answers brings Charlie Parker to Britain…

Switch off the internet. Put your phone on “urgent calls only”. I can recommend a long plane journey as ideal conditions… And settle in to read this huge volume that answers some questions about Charlie Parker, brings other elements to a close – yet leaves plenty still to be learned.

There have been multiple strands in John Connolly’s writing over the past few years – not just in the Parker sequence, but in his short stories as well – and A Book of Bones brings them together. Not in a neat bow, because that wouldn’t reflect the untidiness of life (particularly those of Parker, Louis or Angel), but in a way that makes you want to go back and re-read all the stories so you can see how they (and indeed you, the reader) have been masterfully manipulated into assumptions and deductions that might seem fanciful when the truth is revealed. I’m being very deliberately opaque: those who’ve stayed with the series since that first book deserve not to be spoiled, not just as to the revelations themselves, but even as to which revelations they are.

Parker enters new territory in this novel, and we see him from some very different viewpoints than those we’ve encountered before. That is in part because of the format of the book – it’s a tale that blends together a UK police investigation, US law enforcement, events from history, a battered private detective, and the supernatural, with each element pitched correctly in terms of drama and characterisation. British folklore plays an important role, and is given the weight it deserves (knowing certain of the locations quite well, I can attest that Connolly describes them accurately, not just physically but in terms of their spirituality, or lack thereof). Perhaps more than in any other Parker novel, there’s a real sense of evil at play – and that’s not something that has to be otherworldly to exist, human nature being what it is.

With so much to get through, you might expect Connolly’s prose to be sparser, but there are still plenty of those paragraphs that have characterised his writing (whether it’s in these novels, or his Stan Laurel book He, or his short stories) where you start to move on then realise that you’ve just had a new insight into human nature. It’s for those moments as much as the inexorable pace of Parker’s investigation that I always look forward to a new Connolly story. Parker’s story doesn’t finish here – roll on book 18!

Verdict: Essential reading for any Charlie Parker fan, and a masterclass in juggling multiple styles. 10/10

Paul Simpson