John Connolly, Every Dead Thing

Have to add this to the 2004 “best” list. Wow. Connolly is Irish, but his protagonist is an American named Charlie Parker. Although his parents weren’t jazz fans, he has always been called Bird. With that silliness aside, Connolly then gets down to business. Bird was a NYPD homicide detective until his wife and child were brutally murdered. Obsessed with finding the killer, he roams around for a bit, and comes back to NY only to get involved in a case as an unofficial investigator. He tracks down the guilty parties in that case, which also deals with the murder of children, and it leads him into a new line on the serial killer who took his family. The second half of the book deals with tracking down the killer, who is one of the creepiest serial killers I’ve seen in print. Very well written, with excellent character development.