John Connolly is the author of the #1 internationally bestselling Charlie Parker thrillers series, the supernatural collection Nocturnes, the Samuel Johnson Trilogy for younger readers, and (with Jennifer Ridyard) the Chronicles of the Invaders series. He lives in Dublin, Ireland. For more information, see his website at JohnConnollyBooks.com, or follow him on Twitter @JConnollyBooks.

Klappentext

"From internationally bestselling author and "creative genius who has few equals in either horror fiction or the mystery genre" (New York Journal of Books) comes a gripping thriller starring Private Investigator Charlie Parker. When the body of a woman--who apparently died in childbirth--is discovered, Parker is hired to track down both her identity and her missing child. In the beautiful Maine woods, a partly preserved body is discovered. Investigators realize that the dead young woman gave birth shortly before her death. But there is no sign of a baby. Private detective Charlie Parker is hired by a lawyer to shadow the police investigation and find the infant but Parker is not the only searcher. Someone else is following the trail left by the woman, someone with an interest in much more than a missing child

Zusammenfassung
“With its singular characters, eerie subject matter, and socko style” (The New York Times), this gripping thriller from the internationally bestselling author John Connolly follows Private Investigator Charlie Parker as he is hired to track down the identity of a dead woman—who apparently died in childbirth—and her missing child.

In the beautiful Maine woods, a partly preserved body is discovered. Investigators realize that the young woman gave birth shortly before her death. But there is no sign of a baby.

Private detective Charlie Parker is hired by a lawyer to shadow the police investigation and find the infant but Parker is not the only one searching. Someone else is following the trail left by the woman, someone with an interest in much more than a missing child…someone prepared to leave bodies in his wake.

And in a house by the woods, a toy telephone begins to ring and a young boy is about to receive a call from a dead woman.

With breathless pacing and shivery twists and turns, “this is Connolly’s masterpiece” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).

Leseprobe
The Woman in the Woods

CHAPTER

I

The bar was one of the more recent additions to Portland’s waterfront, although the term “recent” was relative given the rapid pace of development in the city. Parker wondered if at some point every person reached an age where he or she prayed for a pause to progress, although often it seemed to him that progress was just so much window dressing, because people tended to remain much as they had always been. Still, he wished folks would occasionally leave the windows as they were, for a while at least.

The presence of the bar was indicated solely by a sign on the sidewalk, required because the establishment was set back from the street on the first floor of an old warehouse, and would otherwise have been difficult, if not impossible, to find.

Perhaps this was why it appealed to Louis. Given the opportunity, Louis might even have dispensed with the sign entirely, and supplied details of the bar’s location only to those whose company he was prepared to tolerate, which meant that maybe five people in the world would have been burdened with the responsibility of keeping it in business.

No such tactics were required on this night to offer Louis the peace he desired. Only a handful of customers were present: a young couple at a corner table, two older men eating burgers at the bar, and Parker and Louis. Parker had just been served a glass of wine. Louis was drinking a martini, very dry. It might not have been his first, but with Louis it was always difficult to tell.

“How is he?” Parker asked.

“Confused. In pain.”

Days earlier, Louis’s partner, Angel, had been relieved of a tumor the size of an egg in a New York hospital, along with a length of his large intestine. The procedure hadn’t gone entirely well, and the recuperation period would be difficult, involving chemotherapy sessions every three weeks for the next two years, while the threat of ancillary growths remained. The call to inform Parker of Louis’s presence in the city of Portland had therefore come as a surprise. Parker had intended to travel down to New York to visit Angel and offer Louis whatever support he could. Instead, Louis was sitting in a Portland bar while his partner lay in a hospital bed, medicated up to his eyeballs.

But then, Louis and Angel were unique unto themselves: criminals, lovers, killers of men, and crusaders for a cause that had no name beyond Parker’s own. They kept to their particular rhythm as they walked through life.

“And how are you?” asked Parker.

“Angry,” said Louis. “Concerned and frightened, but mostly angry.”

Parker said nothing, but sipped his wine and listened to a ship calling in the night.

“I didn’t expect to be back here so soon,” Louis continued, as though in answer to Parker’s unvoiced question, “but there were some things I needed from the condo. And anyway, the New York apartment just didn’t feel right without Angel next to me. It was like the walls were closing in. How can that be? How can a place seem smaller when there’s one person missing from it? Portland’s different. It’s less his place. So I visited with him this afternoon, then took a car straight to LaGuardia. I wanted to escape.”

He sipped his cocktail.

“And I can’t go to the hospital every day. I hate seeing him that way.” He turned to look at Parker. “So talk to me about something else.”

Parker examined the world through the filter of his wineglass.

“The Fulcis are considering buying a bar,” he said.

Paulie and Tony Fulci were Portland’s answer to Tweedledum and Tweedledee, assuming Tweedledum and Tweedledee were heavily—if unsuccessfully—medicated for psychosis, built like armored trucks, and prone to outbreaks of targeted violence that were often, but not always, the result of severe provocation, the Fulcis’ definition of which was fluid, and ranged from rudeness and poor parking to assault and attempted murder.

Louis almost spat out his drink.

“You’re fucking kidding. They haven’t told me anything about it.”

“Maybe they were afraid you might choke—and not without justification.”

“But a bar is a business. With patrons. You know, regular human beings.”

“Well, they’re banned from almost every drinking hole in this city, with the exception of the Bear, and that’s only because Dave Evans doesn’t want to hurt their feelings. Also, they help keep bad elements at bay, although Dave sometimes struggles to imagine an element worse than the Fulcis themselves. But Paulie says that they’re worried about falling into a rut, and they have some money from an old bequest that they’re thinking of investing.”

“A bequest? What kind of bequest?”

“Probably the kind made at gunpoint. Seems they’ve been sitting on it for years.”

“Just letting it cool down a little, huh?”

“Cool down a lot.”

“They planning on fronting this place themselves, or would they actually like to attract a clientele?”

“They’re looking fo…