Spider-bites are a nasty way to die, and there is a man out there with an unusual taste for insect venom of all kinds and for the deaths of those who disagree with or affront him. John Connolly's sleuth Charlie Parker is free of the ghosts of his slaughtered wife and child, but sooner or later new ghosts come to him demanding silently that he avenge them. In The Killing Kind , it is not Grace, the ex-girlfriend whose faked suicide he is hired to investigate, so much as … mehrthe dead fanatics she was killed for writing a thesis on. The Aroostook Baptists disappeared into the gloomy woods of North Maine in the sixties and nothing more is known until road workers find a mass burial. Connolly provides his usual excellent combination of snappy one-liners (many of them from Parker's gay assassin sidekicks Angel and Louis) together with scenes of the utmost terror. Parker soon realises that the spider killer, Elmer Pudd, is only the tool of someone far worse, a sanctimonious artist in intolerance and mayhem--and it is only by carefully measured doses that we come to realise just how bad that is going to be. -- Roz Kaveney weniger