The Unquiet: a THRILLER!

The claim is right on the cover. “The Unquiet,” a thriller. The blurb on the front vows that John Connolly is “one of the best thriller writers we have.”

Apparently, a “thriller” involves a crisis of epic proportions. If it’s just a guy and his family who have been kidnapped – that’s “suspense.” It’s clear enough until you factor in the Hollow Men, Connolly’s ghostly specters that inch eerily toward “horror” writing.

“The Unquiet” features detective Charlie “Bird” Parker, one of those series investigators with a troubled background. Some private eyes make the right moves, in time. Parker arrives late, at times.

A woman is being stalked, and Parker quickly finds there’s more to the story. The woman’s father – a child psychiatrist whose patient disappears – had been linked to a seedy exploitation ring just before he disappears. A detective sent to find him also disappears. Parker must find them all.

The stalker (only he’s not the Stalker, he’s the Revenger. Connolly uses one-word nicknames in “The Unquiet,” which also features the Collector and the Guesser) – anyway, the Stalker/Revenger is a really, really bad guy, just out of prison, who wants justice for his vanished daughter.

For a rural area of Maine, the results have to be akin to all of the Roaring Twenties gangland hits occurring on a single day in New York.

Connolly is described as writing poetic prose, which is usually a euphemism for being “wordy,” but there truly are some poetic lines and images scattered throughout. There is also a “poetic” section about Maine’s early-day explorers who ventured into Canada, a history included just to describe the woods.

“The Unquiet” is a – well, it’s a thriller, if you reduce it to a single word, something that author John Connolly generally avoids in bringing along his otherwise gripping story.


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