This is a good,suspenseful story about a former police officer and the search for the killer who took his wife and daughter. He started damaging himself with alcohol before his families' death, now he quit drinking but is tormented by the thoughts of the killer. As he begins to search for him he learns of several other murders,and realize he is looking at a serial killer. The story has a good plot and some very interesting characters,the twists in the road searching for the killer keep you interested,and the surprise ending is great!!

Wow was this one a saga or what! Our detective is certainly using his detecting skills and all of his connections. Charlie is depressed, feeling guilty and on the hunt for a very disturbing killer. The book was a page turner. The ending was super. I enjoyed this book.

The title pretty much gives away the underlying theme of this book. The back story of the protagonist is heartbreaking and shocking. It is a tired refrain, the bad guy coming after the detective, legit or not, and this version is particularly vicious.
The chase, the characters and action are all very absorbing and in many ways curious as the different parts of the story come together.
The part of the book I did not like was the relentless violence. Shooting, stabbing, its all so awful. The cruelty, the evil is overwhelming and hard to read. I did skip over sections when bullets fly and knives are used.
And, as always, the bad guy is so damn slick, he is always in the right place at the right time and is totally under the radar of those chasing him. Bad guys never seem to be late, drop a glove or glasses and slip through the air without the need of cars.
The redeeming quality here is the writing. It is clear the author understand the wave like nature of grief and how impossible to learn to live with and accept the most horrifying of acts. Some of the descriptions of his feelings and perceptions are wonderfully written; the pain is both piercing and palpable.

I would love to read more by this author, but hopefully a story with less horror and loss. He is very talented, but one wonders about his imagination to come up with these awful people.

Tortured and brilliant private detective Charlie Parker stars in this thriller by New York Times bestselling author John Connolly.

Former NYPD detective Charlie "Bird" Parker is on the verge of madness. Tortured by the unsolved slayings of his wife and young daughter, he is a man consumed by guilt, regret, and the desire for revenge. When his former partner asks him to track down a missing girl, Parker finds himself drawn into a world beyond his imagining: a world where thirty-year-old killings remain shrouded in fear and lies, a world where the ghosts of the dead torment the living, a world haunted by the murderer responsible for the deaths in his family, a serial killer who uses the human body to create works of art and takes faces as his prize. But the search awakens buried instincts in Parker: instincts for survival, for compassion, for love, and, ultimately, for killing.

Aided by a beautiful young psychologist and a pair of bickering career criminals, Parker becomes the bait in a trap set in the humid bayous of Louisiana, a trap that threatens the lives of everyone in its reach. Driven by visions of the dead and the voice of an old black psychic who met a terrible end, Parker must seek a final, brutal confrontation with a murderer who has moved beyond all notions of humanity, who has set out to create a hell on earth: the serial killer known only as the Traveling Man.

In the tradition of classic American detective fiction, Every Dead Thing is a tense, richly plotted thriller, filled with memorable characters and gripping action. It is also a profoundly moving novel, concerned with the nature of loyalty, love, and forgiveness. Lyrical and terrifying, it is an ambitious debut, triumphantly realized.



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Let me say first off that this book was much longer I expected. That is one of the downsides of reading an ebook is that I can't just eye it and figure out how long it will be. That being said, this book is well worth reading. There are some slow times as Mr. Connolly did much deeper into the criminal psychology then the ones that published lately. This book really hearkens back to the mysteries of the yesteryear.



There are really two cases in this one book. In the first part, Parker, or Bird as his friends call him, is attempting to find a missing woman and stumbles into a case of child abduction that has been going on for years. Just as he finishes that one off, he receives more information about The Traveling Man, the person who killed his wife and child.


This book is rather dark for the most part but there are some area of comedic relief mainly provided by a couple of Bird's friends, Angel and Louis, who are a gay couple and criminals that Bird had become friends with when he was a cop,.


I really think that my readers who enjoy thrillers and old style mysteries will enjoy EVERY DEAD THING. I really like the hero Bird and his sidekicks so I will be following this series.


*** I received this book at no charge from NetGalley in exchange for a fair and honest review. All opinions expressed within are my own.

I really wanted to like this book, the blurb sounded wonderful. This book just seems long, I could feel precious moments of my life just passing by as I struggled to read this book and give it a fair shot. I sat it down a half of a dozen times, I even read other books and came back to it thinking maybe I was in a funk of some sort. No matter what this book failed to emotionally engage me to the point that I actually cared about what happened to the main character. The plot of the book was well thought out and interesting but I think it would have been better played as a movie script. Overall, it just seemed too wordy and not in a good way. People that like procedural type mysteries would probably enjoy this book more than I did. I did not enjoy this book and I hate leaving a negative review but it is what it is.

Try this one if you'd like to start a new series with a tortured detective trying to solve gory murders. It's well written and fast paced- it's easy to see why Connolly has succeeded. Charlie Parker is more than he seems, which is always a positive. The gruesome descriptions were a bit much for me. THanks to Netgalley for the ARC of this reissue.

A very well written read. I couldn't put it down. I was completely engrossed most of the way. I'm a big fan of John Connolly. The first book of his I read was The Gates which was another riveting read.

a very very gruesome story. Not to be read by yourself on a dark and stormy night! The murder descriptions are way too graphic for a good nights sleep. the characters are real but the violence is over the top. too many people get killed.

I don't know how I've missed reading this series. But I will correct that . I love a lot of different genres , serial killers is up close to the top of my favorites. Charlie Parker is a tortured broken man . This book is full of twists and turns , dark, brooding , edge of your seat riveting. I throughly enjoyed this book .

I have loved Charlie Parker since discovering him and John Connolly but this book made me love him more. It is breathtaking

John Connolly had an idea of a tortured detective... one who's own life had been destroyed by murder, pain and loss...He made this man compelling and able to use his instincts to battle other monsters out there...This is the first book of this character and it is no surprise there are more than 15 others after it.
An excellent read and author.

I would like to thank NetGalley and Atria Books for this edition of "Every Dead Thing" by John Connolly to read and review. I read one of John Connolly's later books ," A Time of Torment", and found that intriguing. "Every Dead Thing" is the very first book written in the Charlie Parker series written by John Connolly. The genre of this book is THRILLER,mystery and a touch of supernatural. I find that the author has written a very dark, horrific,terrifying,evil, and shocking novel. In this book, John Connelly's wife and child have been murdered. The descriptions of their murders and others that follow are filled with gruesome, violent and bloody details.
The main character, Charlie "Bird" Parker is conflicted and at the edge. He seeks revenge for his wife and daughter's brutal murder. At times his personality vacillates and he seems to be in survival mode or a killing mode. Most of the characters are quite flawed and conflicted as well. Charlie "Bird" Parker had been a police officer prior to his family's killing. The story takes place in New York, New Orleans, and other areas. His acquaintances vary from FBI, Police, gangs, and seedy characters. I wonder if the author is attempting to portray Charlie Parker into an anti-hero?
The story discusses good and evil, life and death, mortality and immortality. I found the pace of the story very slow. Some of the scenes that are described really turned my stomach. There are some twists and turns, and a very surprising ending.

This was a really good book considering it’s was a debut novel. I don’t imagine it was meant to be an ongoing series…I say this because there was just so much going on in this book! It was over 400 pages long and it read more like 600. I’m not saying it was boring. It wasn’t. There was just really too much going on. It easily could have been made for two complete books with two great story lines. With a few twists and a minor changes I dare say it could have made for three. If Connolly had planned on making a series, I do believe he would have broken this up into multiple books….I dare say we would all have been the better if he had….

If you’re wondering what it was all about….in this novel we meet Charlie Parker for the first time. I read the last Charlie Parker, #12 in the series, earlier this year because I was lucky enough to receive an ARC of the novel. It was fantastic (https://randombookmuses.com/2014/10/29/review-the-wolf-in-winter-by-john-connolly/). He’s a police detective. Parker’s family is killed right off in this book and we fast forward to months later. Now Parker has quit the force and is working for himself. He takes a job and in the midst of solving that case he is also solving his family’s murders.

There are a few bits that didn’t make sense with me as far as the time frame went. I’m not sure how Parker got from point A to B at times either. Perhaps I was just too distracted to understand, or perhaps it was just a matter of a debut novel and an author that was coming into his own. At any rate, it was a really good read, and having sampled his current writing style, I can vouch that it will indeed get better. This is a storyline and a cast of characters I truly look forward to getting to know. Parker is very complex. Connolly might be writing detective novels, but don’t let it fool you….he really has a way with words…and some of the depth that he lays out amongst the blood, guts and gunfire really give you a cause to stop and reflect. I’m going to leave this review and let Connolly’s own words convince you that you really need to be reading this series….

For a moment they still lived and I experienced their deaths as a fresh loss with each waking, so that I was unsure whether I was a man waking from a dream of death or a dreamer entering a world of loss, a man dreaming of unhappiness or a man waking to grief.

I believe in evil because I have touched it, and it has touched me.

He sat back in his chair. “But I let it go. In the end, you have to let things go. The things you regret are the things you hold on to.” “So is nothing worth holding on to?” asked Rachel. Angel looked at Louis for a while. “Some things are, yeah, but they ain’t made of gold.

I think I wanted to say more, to try to explain to her what it was like without alcohol, about how I was afraid that, without alcohol, each day would now leave me with nothing to look forward to. Each day would simply be another day without a drink. Sometimes, when I was at my lowest ebb, I wondered if my search for the Traveling Man was just a way to fill my days, a way to keep me from going off the rails.

I don’t believe in the next world, Bird. It’s just a void. This is Hell, Bird, and we are in it. All the pain, all the hurt, all the misery you could ever imagine, you can find it here. It’s a culture of death, the only religion worth following

Until next time…

Urania xx

I like John Connolly's writing style, and I enjoy that while he is writing about heavy subjects he can blend a little humor into his works. I started reading this book last week and remembered that I have read it before. Charlie Parker's genesis story starts fast, bogs down in the middle, and ends on a satisfactory note. I never give story details in reviews, just overall impressions, so bear with me.

This book contains a great deal of memory flashbacks, numerous characters, numerous locations, etc. I am not a "deep" reader. While I don't want stories spoonfed to me, I don't like too much complication either. This novel was a bit much for me. I should have kept a flow chart at the beginning to remember who all the characters are and how they figure in. That being said, I'm diving right into Connolly's follow up novel, "Dark Hollow". Nobody said I'm a quitter!

Bottom line, this is a relatively good book that goes a little longer than it should. This isn't light reading. Enjoy!

This is the first book in a series by this author. Charlie Parker is an ex NY cop, now a private eye. His wife and daughter were brutally murdered and he left the police force afterward. Now he is chasing a brutal serial killer.

I have enjoyed other books by Connolly but this was not my favorite. It was his first and he does get better. There was almost too much going on in the book, 3 different stories. I felt that there was so much description that at times it slowed the story down. This book will keep you up at night. There is a lot of violence but there is also some humor. The characters are great. I would give this book 3 1/2 stars. Thank you to net galley for an advanced readers copy.

Great book! But it really gave me a headache in the middle of it. There are too many things going on that it's hard to keep track of the characters. But definitely a must read, it is the first Charlie Parker installment and the series get better and better.

As a rule I don't like series. Having than been said, if more mysteries were like this one, I'd read more mysteries. This book is great in so many ways and to think, this is Connolly's debut novel, does that mean he gets better? Back to singing Every Dead Thing's praises...the plot is taut, there are sort of two mysteries in one book, it's long at almost 500 pages, but the pacing is great. The characters are terrific, interesting and immensely likeable (or hate-able), but either way fleshed out enough and personable enough to elicit an emotion. I found myself thoroughly involved. The writing is incredible, flawless prose with an occasional turn of phrase that can break your heart. I had my suspicions about the killers, but I wasn't sure, the mystery aspect was well executed IMO, some of the scenes were quite horrific and suited to depraved tastes of a horror fan. What can I say, I'm impressed, I'm won over, I'm a fan. I highly recommend this book

Every Dead Thing introduces to us to Charlie Parker, a private detective on the hunt for the serial killer who slaughtered his wife and daughter. Aided by his friends, and criminals, Angel and Luis, Parker tracks the Traveling Man from New York to the Louisiana Bayou, haunted all the while by the uneasy spirits of his lost family.

The Parker series is one of my all-time favorites, and over the course of numerous titles author John Connolly has developed an intricate and rich mythology of good versus evil. This is a series that, somehow, just keeps getting better and better with each new installment.

I really, really wish that books that have been previously released (years ago) would stop being listed on this site as an arc. I read this book in 2010.

I'm not usually into the crime thriller genre, but this was a great read.