John Connolly's 19th Charlie Parker novel finds Louis, an associate of Parker, and Louis's partner, Angel, racing across Europe to exact revenge on Serbian war criminals who have just massacred a contact. But a formidable stranger helping the Serbs can cross between the worlds of the living and the dead in the tense, bloody thriller The Nameless Ones.
War criminals Radovan and Spiridon Vuksan are responsible for the ethnic cleansing of thousands during the Balkan conflict of 1991. Aided by a powerful lawyer, they escaped prosecution and amassed wealth elsewhere in Europe. Now filthy rich, the Vuksan brothers want to return to Serbia with their war criminal friends, but first, a little murdering to settle debts. De Jaager, a fixer and business contact of Louis, is tortured and killed by the Vuksans, along with De Jaager's friends and family. Louis pursues the killers and Angel comes along to help. What isn't clear is the identity of the vicious, killing entity advising the Vuksans. This being will kill anyone threatening the Vuksans, and even becomes a danger to Parker's daughter, Jennifer, who's dead but can still communicate with Parker from beyond. The final confrontation between these different factions crackles with intensity.
Building on events from The Book of Bones, number 17 in the Parker series, Connolly demonstrates the strong viability of Louis, Angel and Jennifer independent of Parker himself. The Nameless Ones takes a visceral, transcontinental fight and turns it into an awesome battle between good and evil fought on two planes of existence. --Paul Dinh-McCrillis, freelance reviewer