John Connolly's A Time of Torment (2016)

It was the clientele that brought the tone of the place down.  If they weren't the dregs of humanity, they were at least on nodding terms with them on this particular Saturday afternoon.
--John Connolly, A Time of Torment (Atria, 2016).

I've been reading Connolly's Charlie Parker novels since the first one, Every Dead Thing (1999), and I find them quite elegantly written and full of insight into the best and worst of humanity.  I do admit that I have never been enamored on the supernatural/fantasy/horror elements in some of them:  life can be horrible enough without bringing in the occult elements.  So I like the Parker novels where the fantasy is kept to a minimum, as it is in A Time of Torment, whose cynical theme could be that no good deed goes unpunished.  Parker takes the case of a man who has been framed on child pornography charges and is out of jail after five nightmarish years. This leads Parker to a cult of sorts in the South, an extreme example of the worst of humanity in an area where others, including the law, fear to go.

The day dawned bright and clear:  blue skies, the barest fragment of a cloud, and a sense of the world transforming itself once again, the beauty of fall still lingering but the trees barer than before, and arrowheads of geese drifting high above, less like birds than the impression of them, as of a child's hurried marks on a blue page.

Connolly is an Irish writer who with his impressive style sees the beauty of nature contrasted with the ugliness of much of humanity, as Parker and his friends function as avenging angels trying to bring some justice to the world through necessary violence.