review by Joe Vaz

Published by: Hodder & Stoughton Price TBA 474pp TP

When discredited child psychologist Daniel Clay goes missing a few months after being implicated in the abuse of his patients, his disappearance leaves a lot of questions unanswered.
Six years later someone is looking for those answers, and refuses to believe that Clay is dead. This is Merrick, the revenger; a father and a killer, obsessed with discovering the truth about his own daughter’s disappearance. Now Merrick’s actions have drawn others from the shadows, half-glimpsed figures intent upon their own form of revenge, pale wraiths drifting through the ranks of the unquiet dead. They are the Hollow Men.

The Unquiet serves almost as an antidote to Black Angel. Whereas Black Angel was a typically complex novel with a mystery that traversed America and Poland, The Unquiet is disquietingly compact in its narrative. Connolly keeps the characters to a minimum, focussing on the disappearance of Clay and the repercussions thereof. Even Parker himself seems withdrawn and tired. All in all it is a more considered, deliberately-paced novel and stands apart from the other Parker books.
Angel and Louis hardly feature and one wonders if Connolly is keeping his cards close to his chest, as he has already announced that the follow-up to The Unquiet will give us a closer look at these favourite characters.
Parker’s ever-present humour has lost none of its bite, and neither has Connolly’s. The Unquiet shines in its ability to rise from the morbid with a page or two of hysterical banter tossed into the middle of what is, in essence, an incredibly dark book, about an incredibly sensitive subject.