The Lovers

Stripped of his investigator's license and working a bar job in Portland, Charlie Parker turns his enforced retirement into an investigation of his own father's past, a man who apparently took his own life after killing two teenagers. The inquiry pulls Parker into the orbit of a young woman running from something unseen and a journalist conducting a parallel investigation into Parker himself. Meanwhile, two figures who have haunted his life from the beginning are closing in with lethal intent. John Connolly's eighth Parker novel is among his most personal.

George Guidall narrates with the earned gravitas of a voice actor who has inhabited this world long enough to know its textures completely. His performance of Parker's introspective passages carries real melancholy, while the thriller elements arrive with the impact of sudden violence breaking a quiet landscape. The Barry Award reflects a novel that refuses to sacrifice literary ambition for genre momentum.