The seventeenth entry in the Charlie Parker series, John Connolly's A Book of Bones is the largest book to date - spanning just shy of 700 pages, to say nothing of multiple countries, at least four different antagonists, a book that might be able to rewrite reality, the Dutch criminal underworld, the shady side of art collecting, and much, much more. In lesser hands, that could be a mess, or at the very least, feel like it's getting away from the characterization and storytelling that's made the Parker series essential reading for me. Instead, Connolly delivers a knockout of a read, one that earns every one of those pages and then some, telling a story about evil both human and supernatural and looking unblinkingly at some of the most unsettling and nightmarish images of the series - and if you've read these books, you know that's saying something.Picking up almost immediately after the events of The Woman in the Woods (which itself drew on elements of Connolly's novella The Fractured Atlas, from his collection Night Music), A Book of Bones draws to a close the most recent mini-arc within the Parker series, one that involves a shadowy lawyer named Quayle, his murderous accomplice Mors, and their efforts to reassemble - and awaken - a book known as the Fractured Atlas, which might be able to plunge the Earth into a nightmare world populated by entities only known as the "Not-Gods". As ever with Connolly, it hardly matters whether these events are truly happening or only a matter of zealotry within the minds of those committing horrific acts; either way, people are dying, and tensions are rising. But more and more, Connolly is giving us glances into what he once called the "honeycomb world," peeling back the surface of our reality and looking at the shadowy aspects underneath, and few authors are as good at filling your mind with a sense of unease, visceral discomfort, and even terror, all done more often than not simply through his prose.Connolly is, as ever, one of the most gifted thriller writers out there, bringing a poet's soul to his descriptions all while driving a relentless crime thriller in which women are being killed at ancient sites of worship and being staged to look like hate crimes to inflame anti-Muslim hysteria. Meanwhile, Parker and his comrades are trying to understand what role the Atlas plays in all of this, track down Quayle, and deal with the re-emergence of a religious sect which nearly cost them their lives once. In other words, there's a lot going on here, but Connolly weaves all of his threads seamlessly, building the pace and tension constantly until a finale which teeters on what might be the literal apocalypse with genuine suspense and dread. And while Connolly has some derails in here that might feel tangential to the plot - insertions that cover the uncertain history of old churches or book dealings - they assist him in giving his world a history all of its own, which only increases the sense that the Parker books are building a universe with its own rules, its own guidelines, and its own mythology. (That so many of those historical notes serve as chilling short stories in their own right doesn't hurt at all.)More than almost any author I can think of, Connolly is fascinated by the exact meaning of evil and the true blurring of lines between moral and immoral actions - not just in Parker himself, whose violence is so often debated in terms of its justice, but in his companions (Angel and Louis, each of whom is a criminal) and even the world around him. A Book of Bones is no exception, and indeed, much of the book seems to be about the evil not only in people like Quayle and Mors, but in "regular" humans, from right-wing bloggers feeding off of xenophobia to hate crimes justified in the name of religion. And even seventeen books into the series, Connolly makes crime still feel horrifying, letting it lose none of its impact or hiding from the reality of taking a life from this world. There is a true sense of reckoning with what this life of violence means to one's existence, and how living in it can change a person in ways they might not ever understand.I have yet to read a bad Charlie Parker book (or, for that matter, a bad John Connolly book), and A Book of Bones is no exception. Is it big, and sprawling, and could some of the detours be cut down? Maybe...but to lose those would be to lose the immersion in Connolly's rich and unsettling world, and the sense of the battle between good and evil that exists not only on a possible supernatural level but in human nature as a whole. And I wouldn't cut any of that out of the books, any more than I would cut Connolly's wonderful prose or his rich characterization of every single figure in the book. It all works together to make another knockout book by one of the only writers whose every book is a day one purchase for me, and one of the only ones who's never made me regret that choice.