A River Red With Blood

The players call it the Game, and its aim is simple: to abduct and kill a stranger without getting caught. They're very good at it. They've been playing it for a long time. And they can keep playing so long as everyone stick to the rules: No Killing Close to Home and No Killing Outside the Game. But those rules have been broken.When the drowned body of a troubled teenager is recovered from a river in Maine's Kennebec Valley, and a young woman disappears from a small rural town, they draw the attention of the private investigator named Charlie Parker. Now Parker will be forced to confront a band of men without morality and without loyalty, not even to one another, in a place where the very darkness is alive.Because something has emerged from the shadows, something very bad.And it wants revenge.

John Connolly is author of the Charlie Parker mysteries, The Book of Lost Things, the Samuel Johnson novels for young adults and, with his partner, Jennifer Ridyard, co-author of the Chronicles of the Invaders. John Connolly's debut - EVERY DEAD THING - introduced the character of Private Investigator Charlie Parker, and swiftly launched him right into the front rank of thriller writers. All his subsequent novels have been Sunday Times bestsellers. He was the winner of the 2016 CWA Short Story Dagger for On the Anatomization of an Unknown Man (1637) by Frans Mier from NIGHT MUSIC: Nocturnes Vol 2.In 2007 he was awarded the Irish Post Award for Literature. He was the first non-American writer to win the US Shamus award and the first Irish writer to win an Edgar award. BOOKS TO DIE FOR, which he edited with Declan Burke, was the winner of the 2013 Anthony, Agatha and Macavity awards for Best Non-Fiction work.