I read a lot of thrillers every year, and Every Dead Thing is one of the darkest I've ever encountered. Having sampled later entries in the Charlie Parker series, I became curious about the traumatic event that shattered his life, the horrendous murders of his wife and daughter. I got more than I bargained for. This intro to the series opens with that event, and "grisly" doesn't begin to describe the scene. There are no leads, and six months later, Parker, having resigned from his job as an NYC homicide detective, embarks upon his quest to find and punish the killer. Along the way, he bounces between NY and pre-Katrina New Orleans, learning from a Creole wise woman that it's probably someone known as "the Traveling Man". This is a rapidly paced, violent book with a high body count, so sickenly graphic that I had to start skipping pages of detail. Now I know what motivates Parker, who becomes a man willing to commit what he considers justifiable murder. It will take a while to get those images out of my head.