A Game of Ghosts: A Charlie Parker Thriller

Connolly smoothly integrates moments of humor into the terrifying plot of his fine 15th supernatural thriller featuring Maine PI Charlie Parker (after 2016’s A Time of Torment). Parker partners with a shadowy FBI agent, Edgar Ross, to locate “individuals who had made a pact, either knowingly or not, with servants of an old evil.” The nature of this pact forms an ominous backdrop to the main action: Parker becomes suspicious when Ross asks him to track down a fellow Maine gumshoe, Jaycob Eklund, who went missing five days earlier. Like Parker, Eklund was an occasional consultant for the FBI. Though Parker is convinced that Ross is lying about the work Eklund was doing, he agrees to look for the PI. On top of all that, he’s threatened with the loss of custody of his grade-school-age daughter, Sam, after she survived an abduction ordeal. That plot line complements, rather than distracts from, the fraught search for Eklund. Agent: Darley Anderson, Darley Anderson Literary (U.K.). (July)