Carol O’Connell, Killing Critics
£65.00
Carol O’Connell is a little less known than she deserves. Her books feature Mallory, a damaged, maverick New York police detective. She is one of a handful of recent novelists that have refreshed and added to the scope of the genre. This novel is about the art world and features an appreciation by Australian based Barry Maitland.
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This book is one of a series of books by Carol O’Connell about a beautiful, damaged, maverick, and almost sociopathic detective named Kathleen Mallory (who insists on being called simply “Mallory”) and the people that love her despite her flaws: Charles, an intelligent, rich, but ugly family friend; Lou, the cop that takes her in; and Riker, her adopted father’s partner. The relationships that develop between these characters as they solve crimes together are the focus of the series. This story (the third in the series), has Mallory investigating a murder which has links to a case that her adoptive father, Lou, worked on years previously. Another interesting and touching story in the series.
Carol O’ Connell came to prominence with her first novel, Mallory’s Oracle (1994) which received rave reviews and blurbs from the likes of James Patterson, Jonathan Kellerman and Richard North Patterson. Kate Mallory is an orphan, a child thief that is adopted by Inspector Louis Markowitz and becomes a crimes analyst for the New York Police Department. Regarded as vulnerable by her superiors she takes to the streets to avenge her her stepfather who is slain at the beginning of the book. We soon learn, however, that the deceptively beautiful and chic Mallory is also street-wise and cunning. What O’Connell then begins to open up is Mallory’s reactions to different situations, beginning with all the personal baggage, then her ongoing reactions to cold, clinical policing rules and forensics science; and her main characters inclination to be a street-fighter in the tradition of the private eye. Finally, Carol O’Connell novels are exceptional portrayals of different aspects of New York life and culture – the mix is the perception are stand out.
Ex-pat Brit living in Australia, Barry Maitland provides a clever and witty take on O’Connell’s work in his Appreciation. The edition compromised 85 numbered and signed copies and 15 deluxe, also signed by Barry Maitland.
Val McDermid, The Distant Echo 1st deluxe rebinding signed
Ruth Rendell, A Sight for Sore Eyes
Rating by LJ on Goodreads on May 21, 2012 :
“Andrew Bliss, art critic pens the phrase “art terrorism” to describe the murder of artist Dean Starr. No one suspects he knows anything about a crime committed in a gallery 12 years earlier. Detective Kathy Mallory wants to reopen the case and a number of people in high places start to get nervous.
I find the character of Mallory completely intriguing. Add to the wonderful secondary characters, a dry humour and it’s a winner. I shall admit, in this book, the characters are better than the story”. LJ on Goodreads
Rating by Barry Maitland on May 21, 2012 :
Extract from the Appreciation by Barry Maitland
“Among the detectives who have transformed crime fiction in recent years, Carol O’Connell’s character Mallory is surely one of the most intriguing and innovative – intriguing because of the peculiar combination of talents and qualities of which she is made, and innovative because of the way in which these play upon the central themes of the genre. She was first introduced to us in Mallory’s Oracle, a young police officer faced with an overwhelming task, to track down the killer of her adoptive father, Inspector Louis Markowitz, head of NYPD’s Special Crimes Section, and a cop of such experience and cunning that his murderer, a serial killer of elderly ladies living in the vicinity of Manhattan’s Gramercy Park, must clearly be a villain of outstandingly dangerous dimensions. Against this monster Mallory seems hopelessly outmatched. Although a police officer, she has never patrolled the streets, her father having kept her working among the computers in Special Crimes. At Markowitz’s funeral, the police Commissioner sees her as ‘so pretty, so vulnerable’ he doesn’t have the heart to insist she hand over her badge and gun as urged by his colleagues, who fear she will go after the freak of whom even her father had been afraid. We soon learn, however, that Mallory has some very formidable qualities of her own. A vagrant child, arrested as a thief by Markowitz and taken in by him and his wife Helen, the savagery of her early experiences has left her with a steely toughness barely tempered by the moral values her adoptive parents attempted to instil. Coupled with this ruthless survival instinct is an equally impressive ability to access everything electronic, giving this deceptively beautiful feral street-fighter the capacity to penetrate all the secrets of the city which are locked up in the computer memories of its public and private corporations ”.