A Game of Ghosts (Charlie Parker, #15)

by John Connolly

He thought of the old commonplace about how giving up vices didn’t make you live longer, but just made it feel as though you were living longer.

Then again, maybe nostalgia was an understandable response to a world that appeared to be going all to hell, as long as everyone remembered that the past was a nice place to visit but nobody should want to settle in it.

She was a round, curvy woman who, for Parker, brought to mind a figure assembled from a selection of soft fruits. Aside

Yesterday, upon the stair, I met a man who wasn’t there. He wasn’t there again today, I wish, I wish he’d go away . . .

His features were smudged and indistinct, as though a thumb had smeared itself across an ink drawing of a face. His

groundwork, and one ignored the mundane at one’s peril. After half an hour he was no wiser than when he started,

This,” said Angel to Louis, “is the best fucking idea anyone ever had since, like, Columbus bought a boat.” The two men, along with Parker, were sitting

Perhaps other souls than human are sometimes born into the world, and clothed in human flesh.

It was like finding oneself under the scrutiny of a stuffed bird. His

Angel and Louis in particular could have catalyzed a coma victim back to consciousness. He knew where Parker and the others were

had been like wandering into the wrong carnival sideshow, the kind that left one feeling sick and slightly soiled.

gazing upon him with eyes that were too old for her face.

Although it was cold out, he opened the window slightly because the room smelled of sleep. The action dislodged something red and black from the frame,

“I think we’ve established that her son is crazy, and crazy cancels out clever every time.”

She might suspect it, but I haven’t met a mother yet who’d admit her child was out where the buses don’t run, not without a fight.” “But Mother must have signed off on Vincent Garronne

“I think Philip could spend an afternoon throwing puppies from the top of the Empire State and only stop when his arm got tired.” “It’s not the same as killing

Their smiles never lit up their eyes, and

clever wasn’t the same as honest.

If you’re getting fucked, then you’re getting fucked. But if you’re getting fucked by someone who’s smiling, then you’re really getting fucked.”

I’m not in the business of facilitating the creation of martyrs. That’s

bought a pristine copy of Man on the Run, a biography of Paul McCartney that began not with the Beatles, but with what McCartney did after they broke up. Parker had always preferred McCartney’s work to John Lennon’s, whatever effect it might have had on his standing with the cool kids. Lennon could only ever really write about himself, and Parker felt that he lacked empathy. McCartney, by contrast, was capable of thinking, or feeling, himself into the lives of others. It was the difference between “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane”: although Parker loved both songs, “Penny Lane” was filled with characters, while “Strawberry Fields Forever” really had only one, and his name was John Lennon. Parker might even have taken the view that Lennon needed to get out of his apartment more, but when he did, an idiot shot him. He’d probably been right to spend the best part of a decade locked inside. Ross appeared just as McCartney

think you just like tethering goats.” “Well, be sure to tell me when your rope begins

although his physician had advised him not to be overly concerned about forgetting facts and names, and he should begin to worry only if he stopped noticing that he couldn’t remember them—if, in essence, he forgot that he was forgetting.

They looked to Ferrier like they ate bad food to match their bad taste in clothes and wheels. The

“He has his father’s distinctive good looks, like a badly made crash test dummy. He also smells like a funeral parlor, but that may be incidental.”