John Connolly has been called the unrivalled master of Maine noir; his writing not so much hard boiled as noir boiled,.. and indeed The White Road is detective gothic from first to last.

Connolly has used his skill in the past to weave the black styles of the fairy tale and gothic chill into his writing, but it is his fascination with ghost stories that has increasingly influenced his books. In The White Road the reader is snagged into the shadowy world created by the southern States' memory of horrors that beggar belief, ancient wounds that gape open below the thinly closed surface - of old money and slave traditions. There is nothing so black and white as the pale moonlit KKK robe, or as dark as midnight coloured skin.

Charlie Parker, doggedly loyal to old friends, and stubbornly supportive of lost causes, agrees to help in a horrifying murder case in South Carolina. In doing so, his own ghosts are given free rein in a place where atmosphere alone would murder hope. His is not so much an investigation, more a decent into the abyss.
The chilling preacher Faulkner is again a dark presence in the background whilst Parker's friends, Angel and Louis, damaged and deadly, follow their own avenging trail. So brilliant at creating villains, Connolly has given us the strange and menacing Mr Kittim and the deformed killer Cyrus Naim, both of whom lead Parker down one shadowy road after another.

There is never a simple answer to Connolly's plots, but as the differently coloured strands of The White Road are pulled together, the dark and the pale flowing into one, it is again clear that the storytelling is superb. There are few authors who can make their words dance to such a dark rhythm as Connolly'...

Will Landon is a junior SIS officer, just important enough to represent the Service at the funeral: the head of the Asian department has commited suicide, and Landon's job is damage limitation. The first surprise is that the dead spy had a publicity agent of the Palestine Liberation Organization in the family. The second one is that SIS didn't know his sister-in-law even existed. So when she publicly accuses the Service of killing him, Landon braces himself for trouble - and soon finds it. In Florida, meanwhile, ruthlessly ambitious Jill Sheridan - the woman who means to head the service one day - is engaged in some damage limitation of her own, staying well out of the way as her lover's wife involves her in a very messy divorce. It's bad enough when someone tries to blackmail Jill by involving her in a pornographic movie. More importantly, though, how did an Islamic terrorist group find out where she was? It's finally Landon who makes the connection between these two incidents and two hundred and sixteen bottles of illicit "whiskey" that turn out to contain a poison that could wipe out half the population of London.

Glenn Meade began writing Resurrection Day in the summer of 1999. In the novel an al- Qaeda terrorist cell threatens to attack Washington with a weapon that will cause untold devastation and bring America to its knees. He finished the novel at the end of August 2001 and flew to Italy for a short holiday. Eleven days later he switched on the TV in his hotel room and watched in horror as the al-Qaeda hijackers destroyed the twin towers and the world was changed forever.
Glenn knew two of the victims who perished that day. One was a passing acquaintance he had met on frequent trips to New York. The other was a former top FBI counter-terrorist chief, an acknowledged expert on al-Qaeda. Glenn had consulted him during the research for the novel. His death was an incredible irony. Exasperated by his FBI superiors, whom he had repeatedly warned of the likely risk of an attack by Islamic extremists on US soil, he felt he was not being listened to and resigned from the Bureau to start a new career - as Head of Security at the Twin Towers. He died when the first plane hit.
Glenn had a constant dread while writing the novel that al-Qaeda might carry out a major terrorist attack on a US city. Having done extensive research and having interviewed many terrorist experts in the States and listened to their opinions he had come to the stark conclusion that such an assault was not only possible, but imminent.
In the course of his research the FBI wanted to know the outline of the novel in great detail in return for their help. As he investigated exactly how the FBI might deal with an attack of this kind, Glenn began to feel that he was dealing with a vast bureaucratic Organisation that sometimes behaved like a headless chicken.