The Dirty South: an introduction to Charlie Parker

What is this about? 

Girls are being murdered in Burdon County, which brings Charlie Parker to town. He thinks the murders might lead him to who killed his wife and daughter, and instead he finds himself embroiled in something else entirely.

What else is this about?

The Charlie Parker series is 18 books long, so I thought this would be a great introduction to Charlie Parker. It is — and the casual racism and misogyny of the time.

Blurb

It is 1999, and someone is slaughtering young black women in Burdon County, Arkansas.

But no one wants to admit it, not in the Dirty South.

In an Arkansas jail cell sits a former NYPD detective, stricken by grief. He is mourning the death of his wife and child, and searching in vain for their killer. He cares only for his own lost family.

But that is about to change . . .

Witness the becoming of Charlie Parker.

John Connolly is an author I’ve wanted to read for a long time, and it’s possible I have, but I don’t recall it much. The Charlie Parker series is a popular one, but at 18 books long, a bit intimidating to start from the beginning, so when I saw the blurb for The Dirty South, I thought this might be a good spot to learn about Charlie Parker.

In The Dirty South, Parker comes to Cargill in Burdon Country because a young black girl has been murdered and he suspects (hopes) it might be because the same man who killed his wife and daughter killed her. His grief is recent, surrounds him and is in everything he does — and anyone who tries to use it against him, to bait him is in for a an unpleasant surprise because nothing they say can compare to what he’s already told himself and experienced.

The police chief, Griffin, asks him to stay to find out what happened to the girl (and in fact that should be girls because more than one young black girl has been murdered) and Parker agrees — and that’s when he is introduced to the politics and money of the county and how desperately people will work to keep the money coming into the county — even at the expense of the young black girls who have died.

This involves running afoul of the Cades, a powerful family in the county determined to make the right deals to secure its future (and wealth) in the county. There are other players who want a piece of the financial future of the county, and they too will do anything to save it.

There’s a wealth of casual racism, and a dose of misogyny in this case and county and honestly after a time, I grew weary of it.

Connolly makes a point of having one of his characters point out that the South is more than the caricatures of the Dukes of Hazzard (and there’s another show he mentions I can’t recall), and I am sure that it is. But, as I was reading this, Jacob Blake was shot in the back, and protests were sweeping across Kenosha — and as the men in this book dismissed the lives of the black women I was hard-pressed to see anything more than that to this small town, and this story in which black women’s lives meant nothing.

I managed to finish this book, and wished I’d started this series with another. Look, I don’t know anything about the South now, any more than I do about the South in 1999 and the politics, money and desperation of the people there, and I wish even more that I could remove myself from the things happening around me to read a book without it intruding on my experience of reading — but in this case, that wasn’t possible.

If there’s something I am missing please tell me — especially if you are a fan of this series.

What is my impression of the Charlie Parker series after this? A no holds barred look at the darkness that lies within Charlie Parker, but I still haven’t decided if it’s a series I want to continue following.