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110th out of 1,210 books
—
6,529 voters
The Reapers (Charlie Parker #7)
by
John Connolly (Goodreads Author)
The Reapers are the elite of killers. The sins of Charlie Parkers past are about to be visited, someone is hunting Louis, targeting his home, business, and his partner, Angel. The instrument of revenge is Bliss, a killer of killers. When Louis and Angel decide to strike back, they disappear. They are led by Parker, a reaper in waiting. The harvest is about to begin.
453 pages
Published
(first published 2008)
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Apr 24, 2013
Brandon
rated it
5 of 5 stars
·
review of another edition
Recommends it for:
People looking for easy reads, fans of never ending series
I doubt that Connolly ever had the idea that he would do an entire book dedicated to Louis and Angel. That being said, I had hoped early on that this book would eventually exist.
In The Reapers, long time associates of Charlie Parker, Louis and Angel, get their own novel. Louis and Angel have recently fallen into the cross hairs of a rival long thought dead. A former colleague of Louis, Bliss, has returned to seek his vengeance against those who brutally disfigured him, leaving him for dead years...more
In The Reapers, long time associates of Charlie Parker, Louis and Angel, get their own novel. Louis and Angel have recently fallen into the cross hairs of a rival long thought dead. A former colleague of Louis, Bliss, has returned to seek his vengeance against those who brutally disfigured him, leaving him for dead years...more
As a faithful reader of the Charlie Parker series, I really appreciated the shift in perspective. Parker becomes a side character as we peel back the outer shell of his friend, the mysterious, lethal Louis. Connolly's books are punctuated by violence and cruelty (I enjoy it, I sheepishly admit), but above all, he's a very psychological writer. Despite the page-turning action and the vivid killings, what you really remember about this book are the many layers of Louis' complex character and the c...more
THE REAPERS (Susp-Angel / Louis-Cont) - Poor
Connolly, John – 7th in series
Hodder & Stoughton, 2008, UK Hardcover – ISBN: 9780340936658
First Sentence: Sometimes Louis dreams of the Burning Man.
Louis and Angel are killers; accustomed to being the hunters. Now they find they are the hunted and the targets of a fellow hitman named Bliss.
I was a huge fan of Connolly’s earlier books. Unfortunately, his style seems to have changed and the elements I one loved have been lost, particularly the lyrica...more
Connolly, John – 7th in series
Hodder & Stoughton, 2008, UK Hardcover – ISBN: 9780340936658
First Sentence: Sometimes Louis dreams of the Burning Man.
Louis and Angel are killers; accustomed to being the hunters. Now they find they are the hunted and the targets of a fellow hitman named Bliss.
I was a huge fan of Connolly’s earlier books. Unfortunately, his style seems to have changed and the elements I one loved have been lost, particularly the lyrica...more
"The Reapers" is a slight departure for John Connolly, whose main protagonist, Charlie Parker, P.I., takes a backseat in this one in order to showcase one of Parker's enigmatic partners, Louis, a tough Southern black killer-for-hire. Louis (pronounced "Loo-ee", like the French King) is a fascinating character, for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that he is gay. He's actually part of a two-man crew of hired killers. His lover, Angel, is also a hit-man. They met and fell in love in...more
John Connolly’s writing flows along like a lyrical river; his narrative structure is excellent, tugging the reader from one sentence to the next. That said, whilst I like Connolly’s books - and this was no exception - The Reapers wasn’t in the same league as some of the other books in the series. The problem for me is that book is effectively the back story to Louis and Angel, the friends of his regular main character Charlie ‘Bird’ Parker – the former police detective who mourns the savage deat...more
Another excellent entry into what is quite possibly the best detective series out there. This time Connolly lets Charlie Parker take a back seat with Louis and Angel as the driving force. The reader gets a deeper insight into Louis' upbringing and things that made him the killer with occasional sparks of conscience that he became. The book also works as a fine meditation on the nature of evil and/or violence and on the effects it has on the innocent and not so innocent bystanders. The adversarie...more
I had to put this book down about 200 pages in; I may return to it one of these days.
After reading The Book of Lost Things and The Gates by Connolly, I decided to try out one of his thriller books, expecting to find the same quality of writing. This book--which is something like #8 in his thriller series--disappointed me.
There's nothing obviously bad about the book. It's just ... boring. I found myself wondering if Connolly was just pressed for time and shit this book out to make a deadline. Lot...more
After reading The Book of Lost Things and The Gates by Connolly, I decided to try out one of his thriller books, expecting to find the same quality of writing. This book--which is something like #8 in his thriller series--disappointed me.
There's nothing obviously bad about the book. It's just ... boring. I found myself wondering if Connolly was just pressed for time and shit this book out to make a deadline. Lot...more
The Reapers, though part of the Charlie Parker series, isn't really about Charlie. Instead, it's Louis's tale. Louis and his partner, in all senses of the word, Angel, are highly skilled hit men who generally support Parker in these books. Angel will kill if necessary, but, he realizes, there's something very dark inside Louis that makes killing a necessity for him. But as this story opens, Louis has grown weary of his dangerous and violent lifestyle, and is attempting to stop killing and start...more
Boy, I feel dumb. I saw this on the shelf at the library and picked it up because I really liked Connolly's The Book of Lost Things. As I was reading this one, I felt early on like I was missing at least one book before this.
Duh!
This is from the Charlie Parker series which I've never read but certainly have heard about.
The Reapers worked as a stand alone, however. Parker is a side character only referred to as The Detective. The main characters are Angel and Louis and Willie. Angel and Louis are...more
Duh!
This is from the Charlie Parker series which I've never read but certainly have heard about.
The Reapers worked as a stand alone, however. Parker is a side character only referred to as The Detective. The main characters are Angel and Louis and Willie. Angel and Louis are...more
This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it,
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Dec 03, 2009
Wendell
rated it
3 of 5 stars
·
review of another edition
Shelves:
trash-horror-guilty-pleasures
This is a strange, and strangely unsatisfying, addition to the so-called “Charlie Parker” series. (Actually, Parker barely appears in this novel.) Connolly dedicates this entry to a focus on Angel and Louis—and the result is a bit of a hack job. There’s so much 10-cent psychology here—so much interior dialogue from within the dark and twisted minds of sinister master criminals who’ve risen to the pinnacle of their careers because they are pure, they are beyond pain, they have dominated their emo...more
This is the first book that I have read from John Connolly and I have to say, it just didn't do much for me. I picked it because the storyline sounded interesting but in reading it, I found it difficult to get a good picture in my mind of both the characters, and the setting. I realize that this is part of a series of novels based on several of the characters in this story but this story should still be able to stand on it's own. The fact that the two main characters in this story are gay, has a...more
An intriguing dark tale about assassins and the underground world they live and work in. Louis (a Reaper) and Angel (his partner in life) are professional killers who are being hunted. As we travel the twisted underground where they operate, their tale slowly unfolds and we catch a glimpse into a world of betrayal that twists and turns at a mind-bending pace. Part one of the story is largely a description of the characters and their backstories. Although little plot is mixed in, the flow of the...more
This is a book in John Connolly's Charlie Parker series, but ostensibly it is really the story of Louis, Parker's enigmatic friend and colleague. When he was a young man, Louis witnessed a horrible race related hate crime, and then committed a crime of his own by avenging the death of his mother. Louis' mixture of intelligence and ruthlessness brings him to the attention to a man named named Gabriel who ran an elite group of contract killers called The Reapers. During his years as a contract kil...more
This my second Connolly read, the first being The Book of Lost Things, which I found delightfully dark and yet imbued with a sense of hope. Connolly showed me that he could take multiple classic fable mythos, intertwine them, and make them his own.
With The Reapers the author immersed me in a world I love; the borderlands between what's right and what's legal. This is a theme I never tire of exploring, and if the same is true for you, be assured that in journeying with John Connolly, you're in th...more
With The Reapers the author immersed me in a world I love; the borderlands between what's right and what's legal. This is a theme I never tire of exploring, and if the same is true for you, be assured that in journeying with John Connolly, you're in th...more
My mom gave me her copy of John Connolly the Reapers, saying she didn't finish as it was too dark and violent. Well, that was all I had to hear (OK, I also read a positive notice somewhere, maybe the NYT). The book centers on Louis, a retired assassin, who still feels rage from the lynching murder of his (probable) father. This is part of the effort to make this fairly nasty person, who after all killed whoever, women and children aside, his bosses required him to kill, sympathetic. If you find...more
This was fun. Dark, intense, intricate, but fun. I picked this book up on a whim, and didn't realize it was the 7th in a series. Lucky me, it was more of a side story within the series, so I had no real issues with reading this book. In fact, it just made me hungry for more info on both the main characters of The Reapers, and the star of the series itself, Charlie Parker.
What I liked most, I think, was the way the author wrote. He has a very lyrical way of drawing pictures for the reader. I also...more
What I liked most, I think, was the way the author wrote. He has a very lyrical way of drawing pictures for the reader. I also...more
I liked Dark Hollow and I thought The Reapers would make for some good back story and continuation for some of the characters. The author goes to great lengths in exhausting an unwarranted depository of descriptive illustrations for ambient and inanimate matters that do nothing whatsoever for the story's sake. (Men are stalking one another across rural farmland: Do I want to know that it's raining and the sky is dark? Yes, of course. Do I want to know what the clouds are shaped like and what tho...more
I was looking forward to reading this book because I had loved "The Book of Lost Things", but "The Reapers" could have been written by a completely different person. I guess that can be both good and bad... Good because it shows the writer's versatility and bad because you are greeted by a whole other being. That being said, here's my review on the book:
It took a while for it to start and grab my attention; maybe around page 230 it took off. I didn't love the main characters and, in fact, found...more
It took a while for it to start and grab my attention; maybe around page 230 it took off. I didn't love the main characters and, in fact, found...more
Some reviewers haven't liked this book. I for one didn't mind the insight into Louis's background. I found it fascinating. The characters of Louis & Angel may have started out as secondary, but they have evolved over the course of the series because of their friendship with the main character, Charlier Parker, and capably carried the entire novel. Also, it's not like Charlie wasn't in it. He even got a new title, "The Detective." Which is entirely appropriate even if he did lose his license...more
Going into the 7th book in the Charlie Parker series I was a tad worried due to the low scores/reviews across the social web. True, I never let these scores scare me away from a book, yet I still found myself concerned about one of my very favorite series. Having just finished the book, I needn't have worried. While The Reapers is as much a Louis & Angel book as it is a Charlie Parker book, it maintains the plot development of the earlier entries, delving into deeper analysis of the deeply t...more
Those familiar with John Connolly’s Charlie Parker series are already acquainted with Louis & Angel; a hitman and burglar respectively, they usually serve as secondary characters to Parker’s lead. In The Reapers, Louis and Angel finally take center stage and the result is… mixed.
While I enjoyed the book tremendously, being a big fan of Angel I couldn’t help but come away somewhat disappointed at the lack of attention given to his character’s history. Louis’ youth and path to becoming a hitma...more
While I enjoyed the book tremendously, being a big fan of Angel I couldn’t help but come away somewhat disappointed at the lack of attention given to his character’s history. Louis’ youth and path to becoming a hitma...more
Vamos a dejar una cosa clara: John Connolly es el mejor escritor actual de novela negra. Escribe como los ángeles, pero eso sí, te ha de gustar la temática policiaco-detectivesca. Este es el séptimo libro de la serie de Charlie Parker, aunque hay que decir que son de lectura independiente. En él toman protagonismo dos de los compañeros de Parker, y es genial porque profundiza en sus historias personales, algo que en el resto de libros únicamente se hacía mención por encima.
Esta vez a quien le pe...more
Esta vez a quien le pe...more
Jun 19, 2009
Author Annette Dunlea
rated it
5 of 5 stars
·
review of another edition
Shelves:
reviews
John Connolly is a great literary crime writer. His latest novel The Reapers is an excellent fast paced novel. It has a great plot and is action packed, a real page turner. It has 544 pages long of excitement and is published by Hodder. Its ISBN is 034093668 and it is now in paperback. It’s cover announces “blood will follow” and in the chain of murders that follows it certainly does. In this book there are three main protagonists : Parker, Angel and Louis. The Reapers are elite killers and the...more
Meh. The book held my interest while I was at the river, but then I had to force myself to finish it after returning home. The author repeats over and over that his characters are killers, weapons, and should not be blamed for their deeds anymore than you would blame a rifle. So if you believe that "Guns don't kill people, people kill people", the theme of this book would be "Contract killers don't kill people, other people who hire them kill people". But that kind of falls apart when the contra...more
Nov 02, 2012
Cherry Mischievous
rated it
5 of 5 stars
Shelves:
audiobook,
own,
willreadthisauthoragain,
alltimefavorites,
favourites,
fromlibrary,
i-ve-read
Review:
I came into this book high from the ending from the last book. There were events there that seem to be escalating towards the paranormal level and I want to know what happens next. Charlie also experienced setbacks and I want to know how he is going to cope with it in this book. Halfway into the book and there was still no Charlie and I started to worry. The book was all about Louis and Angel. But Charlie finally made an appearance and panic is over and I realized it was designed to mani...more
I came into this book high from the ending from the last book. There were events there that seem to be escalating towards the paranormal level and I want to know what happens next. Charlie also experienced setbacks and I want to know how he is going to cope with it in this book. Halfway into the book and there was still no Charlie and I started to worry. The book was all about Louis and Angel. But Charlie finally made an appearance and panic is over and I realized it was designed to mani...more
I read this one out of sequence, but I found that it didn't really matter whether or not I'd read the others (I'd only read 'Every Dead Thing' prior to this).
This one focuses on Angel and Louis, a gay couple who work as assassins, who have previously been background characters in the Charlie Parker series. We find out how the borderline-psychopathic Louis came to this profession, how he met Angel, and the means by which they keep their activities under the FBI's radar. The plot follows the re-em...more
This one focuses on Angel and Louis, a gay couple who work as assassins, who have previously been background characters in the Charlie Parker series. We find out how the borderline-psychopathic Louis came to this profession, how he met Angel, and the means by which they keep their activities under the FBI's radar. The plot follows the re-em...more
With The Unquiet, Connolly moved away from becoming formulaic, and he continues that here. This time around he tells the story from the perspective of Charlie Parker's best friends, Louis and Angel. The pair often help him on his missions, since Louis is a hired assassin (and a good one) and Angel is a thief (and a good one). In fact, Parker is only present in about 1/3 of this book, and the main plot line centers around Louis instead of one of Parker's jobs.
This book was about Louis confronting...more
This book was about Louis confronting...more
A slightly boring book with beautiful writing.
I bought this book 2 years ago without knowing anything about it. It was on sale for less than $2. When I finally opened the plastic cover, I realized that the book was from a detective series, The Reaper was the eighth book (if I am not mistaken, too lazy to check again). Fortunately, the book can be read without reading the previous series first (it wasn’t like Lord of the Rings)
Blurb:
As a small boy, Louis witnessed an unspeakable, racially motiva...more
I bought this book 2 years ago without knowing anything about it. It was on sale for less than $2. When I finally opened the plastic cover, I realized that the book was from a detective series, The Reaper was the eighth book (if I am not mistaken, too lazy to check again). Fortunately, the book can be read without reading the previous series first (it wasn’t like Lord of the Rings)
Blurb:
As a small boy, Louis witnessed an unspeakable, racially motiva...more
In "The Reapers," John Connolly has given his readers some background on the history of two of Charlie Parker's humorous, homesexual sidekicks.
Someone is after Louis because of something he saw when he was a teenager.
We learn of Louis' childhood and the misfortunes that his family went through. Racial hatred was the reason someone acted in such a manner that changed Louis from a shy teenager into a cold blooded murderer.
The person hunting Louis is named Bliss. Bliss is known as a killer of kille...more
Someone is after Louis because of something he saw when he was a teenager.
We learn of Louis' childhood and the misfortunes that his family went through. Racial hatred was the reason someone acted in such a manner that changed Louis from a shy teenager into a cold blooded murderer.
The person hunting Louis is named Bliss. Bliss is known as a killer of kille...more
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John Connolly was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1968 and has, at various points in his life, worked as a journalist, a barman, a local government official, a waiter and a dogsbody at Harrods department store in London. He studied English in Trinity College, Dublin and journalism at Dublin City University, subsequently spending five years working as a freelance journalist for The Irish Times newspaper...more
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“They were on the side of the angels, even if the angels weren't entirely sure that this was a good thing.”
—
12 people liked it
“The Detective was different. Not that he wasn't a good man; Willie had heard enough about him to understand that he was the kind who didn't like to turn away from another's pain, the kind who couldn't put a pillow over his ears to drown out the cries of strangers. Those scars he had were badges of courage, and Willie knew that there were others hidden beneath his clothes, and still more deep inside, right beneath the skin and down to the soul. No, it was just that whatever goodness was there coexisted with rage and grief and loss.”
—
7 people liked it
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The language Connolly uses is just fabulous--poetic.
Jun 10, 2008 02:05pm