Critical Mick

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The White Road
by John Connolly
Hodder, 2003

More Bad Men

No surprises here... for The White Road John Connolly is once again pitted against:

Critical Mick's Patented Hardboil Checklist Alcoholic Ex-Cop Hero? Serial Killers? Wisecracks? Wiseguys? Dead Bodies? Both buried and exhumed Interesting Locations? Redhead Love Interest? Oo baby!   Spooky Shit?

Potted plot: Grieving parents call Charlie Parker in to replace another Maine-based PI on the long-cold trail of their missing daughter. Instead of offering hope, Parker can only provide truth. He makes them face the hard fact that the young graduate smiling from the photo is years dead. Connolly's world hangs heavy with knowledge of good and evil, not happy endings.

Parker, still recovering from a failure to protect his own child and wife, goes home to confide with his pregnant girlfriend Rachel. News again is not good: Reverend Aaron Faulkner, a psycho that Parker recently helped to bring to justice, is likely to be released on bail. Just as Parker and his colleagues, Angel and Louis, often punish old wrongs, Faulkner is sure to seek terrible vengeance. John Connolly's characters are all hard, violent men.

And so far, Connolly is still just setting up subplots. The White Road's journey begins in earnest when Connolly receives a plea from a South Carolina defence attorney named Elliot Norton. Not one to deny an old friend, Parker sets out for the land of blood-soaked whips and rice barons, rednecks and racists. Connolly's view of the South is as sunny as swamp bottoms where dismembered bodies can be sunk so deep they will never be found. Danger drawls along as a constant threat in Parker's ear.

Eliot Norton's task is to defend a poor black teen, Atys Jones, who stands accused of murdering his white girlfriend, and it's Parker's job to nose in where he is not wanted and ask questions that no one wants to hear. The battered girl, Marianne Larousse, was the daughter of the community's richest pillar, Earl Larousse. Jones, Parker concludes, is probably innocent. He's mouthy and annoying, though.

Unbeknownst, back up in Maine, a recently-paroled serial killer starts hearing voices that Connolly fans will recognize from an earlier book. Will Louis and Angel be able to shield Rachel? Will Parker and Norton successfully keep Atys Jones alive, and bring to light sordid connections that Earl Larousse would not want known? And what's with the creepy, shrouded woman and all these ghost stories about the white road?

Adding a bit of class to the genre, Connolly opens this his fourth novel with an excerpt from TS Eliot's "The Wasteland" that I had not previously conceived of as ghostly. His Parker novels usually weigh in about 30% supernatural and 70% crime, but in 2003's The White Road John Connolly tips that balance heavily in favor of the terrifying shapes circling on black wings. It's creepy.

Even the human characters are demonic in taste and temperament. This novel is an array of bad men doing violent, terrible things. Hooks and handguns, flame and hard fingers. Heads are bashed open, cheeks are punctured by crosses sharpened into stilettos, people spit into each other's mouths. This road is not one for the squeamish to walk.

The White Road ties in more closely with previous instalments than is common for a series. In fact, the baddies dispatched in The Killing Kind, Connolly's third Charlie Parker novel, also serve as a presence with very real menace in this fourth. It was an interesting continuity that I found reflective of true life.

John Connolly prides himself on researching his books well, but in my years living below the Mason-Dixon I never have seen whole white communities gathering for a picnic and lynching. He did, however, include representatives from the unique culture of the sea islands off the Carolina coast. That is a pleasingly obscure corner of Southern culture not seen since Pat Conroy's The Water is Wide. A fine inclusion.

While referencing other familiar books, it's fitting to mention that the mission to hide and protect Atys Jones called to mind Laura Lippman's 2006 No Good Deeds and Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. Lee Child's Die Trying supplied some extra white supremacist baddies. There's James Lee Burke in this mix as well as Stephen King. John Connolly selects good companions for this fast, twisting journey.

Zombentino!!!

Critical Mick says: The White Road is one to race along. Though somewhat excessive, the novel is original, engaging, and full of atmosphere. Eight scurrying, poisonous recluse spiders out of ten.

Zombentino!!!

Read Ali Karim's excellent April 2003 interview with John Connolly!

Yo! This review and all content on the DFA Guide site are copyright 2008 Mick Halpin. All links to other sites and documents are copyright to whatever source wrote something cool enough for Mick to give it a referral. Try to claim them as your own work and bad karma will catch up with you, baby. Believe it.

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