Description:

When a young woman disappears from the streets of New York City, ties of friendship and blood inevitably draw ingenious, tortured detective Charlie Parker into the search. Soon he discovers links to a church of bones in Eastern Europe, a 1944 slaughter at a French monastery, and to the myth of an object known as the Black Angel -- considered by evil men to be beyond priceless. But the Black Angel is not a legend. It is real. It lives. It dreams. And the mystery of its existence may contain the secret of Parker's own origins.

With The Black Angel, John Connolly takes his Charlie Parker series a step further away from the conventional serial killer thriller and over the border into supernatural horror-which, in fairness, is where these extraordinary books have been heading from the beginning. The question of why and how so many bad people find their way into Parker's orbit has always been lurking in the background of his novels; why so many ghosts of victims point him the way to vengeful justice and why so good a man is so fond of his killer for hire friends Louis and Angel. Many writers would just leave these as givens, but Connolly has too much integrity for that. The search for Louis' junkie whore cousin, and her abductors, leads the trio ever further into darkness. They have fought evil obsessives before, but none as bad as the Believers, a group obsessed with fallen angels and with the strange sculpted objects men have made from human bones. This time at least there is a possibility that what the Believers believe is true, both what they believe about the world and what they believe about Parker-this is a book which ought to be insane and ludicrous and is in fact chilling. -Roz Kaveney