This is the third book in Dublin-born, John Connolly's series featuring Charlie 'Bird' Parker. The previous two books, 'Every Dead Thing' and 'Dark Hollow' were international bestsellers.

In this new novel, nobody wants to believe that Grace Peltier committed suicide: not Curtis, her father; not former U.S. Senator Jack Mercier; and not private detective Charlie Parker, who has been hired to investigate the circumstances of her death.

But when a mass grave in northern Maine reveals the final resting place of the Aroostook Baptists, a religious community that disappeared almost forty years earlier, Parker realises that their deaths and the violent passing of Grace Peltier are part of the same mystery, one that has its roots in her family history and in the origins of the shadowy organisation known as the Fellowship.

For before she died, Grace Peltier stole something from the Fellowship, a relic capable of linking it to decades of violence and the slaughter of the Aroostook Baptists, and now someone has been sent to recover it. Lied to, intimidated and haunted by visions of a small, stray boy, Parker's search for the truth behind Grace's death draws him into a series of increasingly violent confrontations with the Fellowship's enforcer, the demonic arachnophile known as Mr. Pudd.

Aided and abetted by the genial killers Angel and Louis, Parker must descend into the depths of an underworld populated by dark angels and lost souls, a world where the ghosts of the dead wait for justice and the unwary are prey for the worst kind of creatures … the killing kind!