Every dead thing

Charlie "Bird" Parker used to be a New York City homicide detective, until he came home one night to find his wife and young daughter murdered and mutilated while he sat drinking in a nearby bar. Two years on, guilt and grief have turned him into an unlicensed private investigator scraping by on the margins.

Hired by a wealthy Virginia family to find a missing young woman, he follows her trail from the Blue Ridge to the bayous of Louisiana, where the case tangles with the predator he believes killed his own family: a serial killer known only as the Traveling Man, who takes his victims' faces as trophies.

Aided by criminal psychologist Rachel Wolfe and by Louis and Angel, two dangerous men from the New York underworld, Parker is pulled into a hunt that will not let him go. Every Dead Thing launched John Connolly's Charlie Parker series and won the Shamus Award for Best First P.I. Novel.