The White Road: John Connolly

In South Carolina a young black man faces the death penalty for the rape and murder of Marianne Larousse, daughter of one of the richest men in the state. No-one wants to touch this case. Its roots are in old evil, and old evil is private detective's Charlie Parker's specialty. Parker is about to enter a living nightmare, a dreamscape haunted by the murderous spectre of a hooded woman, a black car waiting for a passenger that never comes and by the complicity of friends and enemies in the events surrounding the Larousse investigation. It will be a confrontation with dark forces that threaten all he holds dear: his lover, his unborn child and even his soul. In a prison cell far to the north, fanatic preacher Faulkner is about to take his revenge on Charlie, using the very men Parker is hunting and a strange hunched creature that keeps it own secrets buried by a riverbank: the undiscovered killer Cyrus Nairn. All of these characters will come to a showdown in southern swamps and northern forests, in distant locations linked by a single thread, the place where the paths of the living and the dead converge... A place known as the White Road. Cover art by Mark Harrison after a detail from an engraving by Veneziano, Allegory of Death and Fame.