A Time of Torment: A Charlie Parker Thriller [Paperback]

#1 internationally bestselling author John Connolly delivers a masterful combination of “the hard-boiled with the supernatural” (Publishers Weekly,starred review) with this return of dangerous and driven private investigator Charlie Parker as he battles an old evil that haunts a strange and isolated community.

Jerome Burnel was once a hero. He intervened to prevent multiple killings, and in doing so damned himself. His life was torn apart, imprisoned and brutalized.

But in his final days, with the hunters circling, he tells his story to private detective Charlie Parker. He speaks of the girl who was marked for death, but was saved; of the ones who tormented him, and an entity that hides in a ruined stockade.

Parker is not like other men. He died, and was reborn. He is ready to wage war.

Now he will descend upon a strange, isolated community called the Cut, and face down a force of men who rule by terror, intimidation, and murder.

All in the name of the being they serve. All in the name of the Dead King.A Time of Torment

Chapter

I

They’re circling now, then falling, descending in a slow gyre, dropping so gently that their approach can barely be discerned. They are hawks in the form of men, and the one who leads them is a being doubly transformed: lost and found, human and bird; youngest of them, yet strangely old. He has endured, and in this endurance he has been forged anew. He has seen a world beyond this one. He has glimpsed the face of a new god.

He is at peace with himself, and so he will wage war.

Faster they come, the spiral narrowing, the three almost as one, their coats mantling in the chill fall air; and not a whisper of their approach, not a passing shadow nor a sparrow startled, only the stillness of a world waiting to be shattered, and the perfect balance of a life, perl3ã