The Killing Kind was published by Hodder & Stoughton in 2001. A mass grave is discovered in northern Maine — dozens of bodies, decades old, connected to the disappearance of a religious community called the Aroostook Baptists in the 1960s. Parker is drawn into the investigation through his connection to a young woman threatened by someone who wants the past to remain buried.
The novel is the most overtly horrific of the early Parker books: Connolly introduces a recurring spider motif (arachnids associated with the supernatural evil that Parker increasingly encounters) and deepens the series’ cosmological framework. The Aroostook Baptists didn’t merely die — they were destroyed by something that found its way into their community through their apocalyptic faith, something that used their willingness to believe as a vector for its own ends.
Connolly also introduces elements that will become central to the series’ larger mythology: the Collector, an entity that harvests the souls of the damned, appears for the first time. Parker’s role as something more than a detective — as a figure chosen or perhaps cursed to stand at the boundary between the living and the dead — begins to crystallize. The crime-fiction scaffolding remains, but the architecture it supports is increasingly metaphysical.
Collecting The Killing Kind
First edition (Hodder & Stoughton, London, 2001): Cloth with dust jacket.
Market values:
- UK first edition, fine/fine: $40–$100
- US first (Atria, 2002), fine/fine: $20–$50