Dark Hollow

I finally finished Dark Hollow.  On a sentence-by-sentence level, Connolly is a fantastic writer.  A couple of quotes I highlighted along the way:

Walter was a good man and, like many good men, his flaw was that he believed himself a better one.

Outside, the snow fell like years, blanketing the past with the unblemished whiteness of possibilities untold.

 Unfortunately, I felt like the plot level was weaker than it should've been.  The novel feels very crowded, with at least three groups of killers, none of them working together.  There's really only one conflict that matters in this novel, Charlie Parker and Caleb Kyle's, and the others just get in the way, and felt a bit like padding.  Abel and Stritch are the worst example; it feels like they could've been stripped from the novel with almost no editing needed.


For me, the balance tips in favor of Connolly's style, and I'll be reading more of these novels.