DARK HOLLOW by John Connolly, Simon & Schuster, 2000, 443 pages, $25.

Now here’s a murky mystery about a serial killer, laid in Scarborough. The protagonist is a former cop, Charlie “Bird” Parker, whose wife and daughter have been killed. He has some weird friends and a Mafia mogul among his enemies. There’s also an ex-girlfriend married to the local chief of police, and a psychologist professor at Harvard that Charlie is drawn to.

While the characters are interesting, it is the plot that carries this suspenseful yarn with its supernatural touch. Connolly, an Irishman, also happens to be a colorful writer, adept at description as well as narration. And he has a deft feel for the Maine scene.

The plot opens with a pair of killings, seemingly unrelated. Parker, the narrator, tells us, “This was an old evil …” and “something old and foul had emerged from the wilderness.” Parker enters the action in mundane fashion as he calls on a small-time, violent hood named Billy Purdue to get the thug to pay child support to his ex-wife, an old friend of Parker’s. Parker almost loses his life in the process of trying to do a favor for a friend.

We learn that Charlie had been a homicide detective in Brooklyn and that he resigned from the New York Police Department one month after his wife and daughter were killed in brutal fashion – homicides that were never solved. He returned to Maine to rebuild his life, but his efforts are sidetracked somewhat when some strange murders begin or, more accurately, resume.

We also meet two more fascinating characters, Angel and Louis, a homosexual pair on the edge of the law who have appointed themselves Charlie’s protectors.

In between introducing us to his creative characters, Connolly treats us to some marvelous description of the Maine scene. He waxes lyrical, as in this example:

“For me, the first sign that winter is coming has always been the change in the coloration of the paper birches. Their trunks, usually white or gray, turn yellow-green in the fall, blending into the riot of chimney red, burning gold and dying amber as the trees turn. I look at the birches and know that winter is on its way.”

His character descriptions are equally picturesque. Here’s a minor character, one of the Mafia “made men”:

“He was short and squat, probably no more than five-five and maybe 230 pounds. He wore a tan raincoat, belted at the front, with brown pants and a pair of brown brogues … He had a face from a horror movie. His head was completely bald, with a rounded crown that ran into wrinkles of fat at the back. The head seemed to grow wider instead of narrower from the temples to the mouth, before it lost itself in his shoulders…”

There is more but that’s enough to show you the depth that Connolly goes to make his characters vividly clear for the reader.

Soon after Parker moves to his grandfather’s old house in Scarborough, he gets wrapped up in killings in the north country, a town named Dark Hollow which “lay about five miles north of Greenville, close by the eastern shore of Moosehead Lake…”

The first killings that attract Bird’s interest are the ex-wife and child of Billy Purdue. He sets out to find Purdue but the Mafia is after Purdue, too, for a large chunk of money that he apparently stole. In the middle of this search, Parker learns of another murder, an old woman, who lived in deathly fear of someone named Caleb Kyle.

Parker recalls a tale that his grandfather – who also had been a cop – had told him about Caleb Kyle “and the tree with the strange fruit at the edge of the wilderness.” That leads Bird into a series of old, never-solved serial killings – six young, attractive women. Meanwhile, the current killings continue and each one seems to have some connection with Billy Purdue.

And it’s Purdue that Parker is seeking as he follows a bloody trail. The first stop is a murder scene where four people have been buried after brutal killings – throats cut, tongues ripped out, a broken jaw on one. More follow.

This is a complex plot that inexorably leads you on. The reader isn’t sure if Bird will solve the current murders or if the earlier ones tie in. Then there’s the search for Billy with the gangland gunmen also on the hunt for him. And finally, who or what was Caleb Kyle?

For one thing, he was a boogeyman in those parts. “It was a name spoken at night, before the light was switched off and the hair tousled by a familiar hand, the soft scent of a mother’s perfume lingering after a final good night kiss: ‘Be good now and go to sleep. And no more trips into the forest, else Caleb will get you.”

Rachel, Bird’s professor-friend, after analyzing all the information Bird assembles, says that Caleb Kyle is worse than “a textbook psychopathic sadist…”

The book is a tense read throughout, but the ending piles suspense upon suspense as Connolly ties all the loose ends together.

This isn’t a murder mystery to finish in one reading. And each time you stop and resume the next day, you have to go back and remember each of the characters before they pop up again. There are times when you’ll wish there were fewer characters but they all make quite a suspenseful bouillabaisse of mystery.