Dark Hollow

Something old and evil has been haunting the residents of a small Maine town for decades, and private detective Charlie Parker has arrived to pull the roots of that evil into the light. The second novel in John Connolly's series takes Parker deeper into territory where the boundary between crime fiction and supernatural horror is deliberately blurred, pitting him against a legacy of violence that predates any single killer. Connolly's Maine is a literary landscape shaped by both Stephen King and Raymond Chandler, and Dark Hollow finds him commanding both traditions with growing assurance.

Jeff Harding narrates the Charlie Parker series with a brooding intensity that suits Connolly's gothic American noir. His voice carries the weight of Parker's particular darkness, a man who has lost everything and is still trying to understand why, and his pacing through the novel's atmospheric passages is measured without becoming sluggish. The horror elements land with particular force in audio, where Harding's delivery makes the creeping dread feel immediate.