Review: THE INSTRUMENTS OF DARKNESS

Author John Connolly is thoroughly Irish, but his grasp of Maine I think is spot-on. His prolific Charlie Parker Series is primarily set in Maine (with occasional backstory elsewhere, such as NYC).

Review:
Nothing--NOTHING--is comparable to a John Connolly "Charlie Parker" novel. I firmly believe this Series exists in some sort of liminal space, and as soon as I turn to the first page, I am "awa' wi' the faeries" (sometimes, almost literally, because long-bereaved Charlie Parker, brutally deprived of his first daughter and her mother, later of the presence of his second daughter), exists himself in a realm not quite our own, an in-between world where suspension of disbelief is unnecessary).

To enter any novel in Connolly's Charlie Parker universe is to step across a portal into an "unknown country" where surface "reality" might look just the same; but in a few moments you're going to discover that not only are you "not in Kansas any more, Toto," you're also not in recognizable reality any more. Here the dead are just a blink away, and apparently we all are psychic. Here the most convoluted conspiracy and plots imaginable are not only possible, but actual.