The Nameless Ones

Early in bestseller Connolly’s outstanding 19th paranormal thriller featuring Maine PI Charlie Parker (after 2020’s The Dirty South), two Serbian war criminals, brothers Spiridon and Radovan Vuksan, torture and murder De Jaager, a Dutch fixer, and three other members of De Jaager’s Amsterdam household. These killings are the latest bloodshed in a cycle of violence that began years earlier when a relative of De Jaager was killed by Serbian gangster Andrej Buha, a cousin of the Vuksans. De Jaager’s American assassin friend, Louis, a colleague of Parker’s, fatally shot Buha, who committed atrocities during the Balkan wars in the 1990s, on De Jaager’s behalf. Aided by a contact in American intelligence who has his own reasons for wanting the Vuksans taken down, Louis travels to Europe to avenge De Jaager’s murder. Connolly makes all his characters, even the most evil, multifaceted, while keeping his audience on the edge of their seats. Series fans won’t mind that Parker is offstage much of the time and the plot is less dependent on supernatural elements than usual. This is another intelligent and haunting nail-biter. Agent: Darley Anderson, Darley Anderson Literary. (Oct.)