A Song of Shadows

A Song of Shadows finds Charlie Parker, grievously wounded, retreating to a small Maine coastal town to heal, where he befriends a widow named Ruth Winter and her daughter. Ruth is hiding from something in her past, and when forces connected to a Nazi concentration camp with a history unlike any other begin closing in, Parker is drawn into a case that requires him to defend people he barely knows against evil that has survived for seventy years.

Jeff Harding has narrated the Charlie Parker series with a dark, atmospheric command that suits Connolly's blend of crime fiction and supernatural horror. His voice gives the Maine coast its appropriate winter desolation, and the scenes connecting present crime to wartime atrocity are handled with the gravity they deserve. Harding's pacing through the novel's long build toward violence is patient and effective.