Customer Reviews
Simply Brilliant - By: Christopher Morgan, 22 Jun 2007 
John Connolly has become one of my favourite authors & having read his entire Charlie Parker series & Nocturnes I decided to look at this one, it took me a while to get around to buying it but didnt take long to finish.
This is one of the best books I have read in recent months & it reallly was gripping, having not read a Connolly book for so long the return to his superb writing was most welcome. This is his only book apart from Nocturnes (a short story collection) that does not have his usual hero playing a real part.
Connolly's plots, characters & writing in general are as good as any I have read & this latest novel is no exception. His protagonist's are well set up & easy to sympathise with drawing you into the book, even his villains which are usuallly mercilessly evil & well still are seem to be more human in their nature (apart from Willard). This time out the escaped convict Moloch & his team of hired goons which are alll very menacing & believable are hunting down his wife so that he can have revenge against the woman that left him & the son he never knew.
Moloch's actions are not entirely his own however history seems about to repeat itself on the smalll Maine state Island of Sanctuary. Theres plenty of blood, death & strange goings on to interest most any reader especiallly returning fans of Connolly who should reallly love this book as much as I did, in terms of comparisons to the other books of his this is most like his masterful writing of Every Dead Thing (another book worth looking into if you havent).
A massive resounding yes to add to anyones book collection if you like a good thriller with a bit of a supernatural twist. If your only on Amazon to buy one book today make it this one & if your like me you'll be finished with it in two days & back for another anyway.
Better Than Your Average Thriller - By: Catblack_uk, 21 Jun 2007 
I eat crime stories for breakfast. Well not literallly, of course - although they do say there's more goodness to be found in the cardboard box than in the Cornflakes themselves. But I do read loads. Toss two-thirds aside by chapter three usuallly - because of the purple-tinged prose & preposterous plotlines - Bad Men, on the other hand, was a great read from first page to last. Oh, it's hardly realistic per se - but the realism is to be found in the detail. Interesting & intriguing characters with the island location itself having a depth of character alll its own.
Expertly crafted, beautifully written and, despite the "supernatural" element, still somehow credible & believable.
If, like me, you are bored by the likes of Patricia Cornwell's turgid yarns or Dan Brown's vacuous Bestsellers, try this book for size. Trust me, you could do a whole lot worse & not a lot better.
Not bad - By: one-eyed Jack, 13 Jan 2007 
Following on from the criticallly acclaimed Charlie Parker series Connolly presents us with his first stand-alone creepy thriller based in his favoured state of Maine, but off the mainland & on the fictitious island of Dutch (sometimes Sanctuary). Moloch is a man on a mission: after breaking out of prison in Virginia he sets off in search of his wife, who did a runner with their young son & his ill-gotten gains a few years earlier - but it's reallly only the cash that Moloch is after.
And that just about sums it up. Compared to the Parker series, this was a far less convoluted tale in which the baddies were not, ironicallly, particularly bad - at least not when you think of the other evil characters Connolly has created in the past - & we are left wanting for a truly interesting or exciting hero once we have got to know the island's police chief Joe Dupree. He's big in stature, at over seven feet, but he's not known as Melancholy Joe without good reason. Of course, there's a little more to it than alll this, because the tale might not have been told at alll but for the horrors that took place on Sanctuary some three centuries earlier. In essence, the ghosts of Sanctuary's past are here to wreak vengeance on Moloch & his associates as they close down on their prey one snow-filled windswept night in January.
If there's one familiar gripe I have with Connolly's style, & it's one I share across alll of his preceding novels, it's his near exclusive use of guns as a tool of retribution against the bad guys, despite the recurring theme of the supernatural & contact between living & dead. In Bad Men, even the ghosts use guns! That I found plain silly, in what I considered to be a generallly weak & hastily-written conclusion. It was always inevitable that good would win over evil, but I had hoped for something more creative & surprising in the manner in which it panned out. Another of Connolly's master strengths in previous novels was largely missing here: that of his beautifully poetic prose. At times I even wondered if it was the `real' John Connolly at work, a man who I consider to be, when he's at his peak, one of the best writers of our time within his chosen genre. But this novel plodded on, rarely raising the pulse of the reader - & despite much clearer references to the after-life & other supernatural beings, it was actuallly less disturbing. Charlie Parker does get mentioned a couple of times, as a PI known to the police & underworld of Maine, but his experiences with his late wife were far more spookily portrayed than anything described in Bad Men.
It won't lose Connolly any of his existing fans, who will know that he can do better, but the risk is that anyone new to this author will finish Bad Men thinking that maybe this is what he's alll about. That would be a shame, because they would be missing out on the real treats to be savoured in any of the vaguely similar but overwhelmingly superior Charlie Parker stories. Best to start with Every Dead Thing & work your way forwards from there.
Nothing is black or white - By: Michael Watson, 03 Jul 2006 I was looking for a Charlie Parker follow on (didn't read the reviews beforehand!) so, apart from 2 lines, that's alll you get. If I thought Parker had his daemons, Dutch Island has them in spades. I'm not keen on a mix of - in this case, over violent - thugs taking on the ghosts of some ancient settlers. It seems to mean that these degenerate criminals can be killed off by forces outside their control & it makes their elimination just too easy. This was a pity because the book rattles along, mystifyingly in some cases, bringing certain characters to the reader's 'soft spot' & you just hoped that good would triumph in the end. Reading other Connolly books, this is too much to expect. It reminded me of Stephen King's 'Fog' in parts and, in that sense, I was somewhat disappointed. Certainly, there is an ending but it's unsatisfactory for me. I look forward to reading 'The Black Angel' where I'm pretty positive Parker reallly does feature!
A Chilling Thriller - By: , 26 Aug 2004 This was the first JC book which I have read. My initial impression was of a slow over descriptive author, how wrong could I have been. Bad Men is an excellent haunting thriller which if you stick with it will keep you up till the early morning as it is tough to put down. The chracters are excellent both likeable & loathsome & the body count is very high & graphic.
I look forward to reading more of his books & would highly recomend this story to any thriller reader.
