Charlie Parker returns in a gripping abduction tale of a mother on trial by media

Crime fiction

Author John Connolly. Photo: Ivan Gimenez Costa

Anne Marie Scanlon

It’s hard to believe that this is the 21st book in John Connolly’s hugely successful Charlie Parker series. The books place the hard-boiled private detective genre in a world where forces of the supernatural secretly exist.

​The Instruments of Darkness begins with echoes of both Madeleine ­McCann and the Casey ­Anthony case in the US.