Carol O’Connell Books In Order

Mallory’s Oracle

Adopted off the streets as a child by a policeman’s family, NYC policewoman Kathleen Mallory had never shaken the wild nature of her youth, and when her adoptive father is murdered during a series of stabbings, she is driven to find the truth. A first novel.

The Man Who Lied to Women / The Man Who Cast Two Shadows

Fifteen years after Inspector Louis Markowitz adopted the wild child, no one in New York’s Special Crimes section knew much about Kathy Mallory’s origins. They only knew that the young cop with the soul of a thief could bewitch the most complex computer systems, could slip into the minds of killers with disturbing ease. In Central Park, a woman dies, while a witness watches, believing the brutal murder to be a prelude to a kiss. Mallory goes hunting the killer, armed with under the skin knowledge of the man’s mind and the bare clue of a lie. Mallory holds on the one truth: everybody lies, and some lies can get you killed. And she knows that, to trap the killer, she must put her own life at risk, for this killer has taken a persone interest in her.

Killing Critics

NYPD sergeant Kathleen Mallory computer genius, street fighter, provocative waif, peerless investigator, manipulative beauty is the gorgeous, near sociopathic hero*ine of this knife edged suspense novel. Along with old pals, Ricker, Coffey, and faithful admirer Charles Butler, Mallory is determined to solve the brutal ‘art as death’ murder of an untalented but highly touted artist critic. Mallory believes the case is the work of the same killer who, 12 years earlier, hacked a young artist and a talented ballerina to pieces. Baffling and intricate, Mallory wades through art critics, bag ladies, madmen and mafioso alike in getting to the bottom of these crimes. Secrets, very deep and very dark, emerge and strike closer and closer to home. By the end, she will come to know the truth but the truth may be the most dangerous illusion of all.

Flight of the Stone Angel

NYPD sergeant Kathleen Mallory is drawn to a place far away from home. In a small town in Louisiana, she steps off the train. Within the hour, one man has been assaulted, another has had a heart attack, a third has been murdered, and Mallory is in jail, though she nothing to do with any of these three events. She is there for an entirely different purpose. Seventeen years earlier, Mallory’s mother died in this town, stoned to death by a mob, and the six year old Mallory had disappeared, to reappear on the streets of New York. Now she’s back to find out who killed her mother, and what happened to the body, vanished as well, its only trace a winged angel in the local cemetery.

Shell Game

At a sell out festival of magicians in Manhattan, in front of a live audience and eight million television viewers, a death defying trick goes tragically wrong. Detective Sergeant Kathy Mallory was convinced that this was murder, and a murder which, mysteriously, might be connected with the death of a woman half a century ago. ‘O’Connell gradually performs the magic of a master storyteller, exposing the lonely heart of Mallory and the vengeance of a killer. Strange and mysterious, Mallory’s fifth outing takes the reader to places no other crime writer visits. It’s a trip worth making’ Val McDermid.

Crime School

Over the course of six novels, Carol O’Connell has become one of our most acclaimed writers of suspense. Her hero*ine, Kathy Mallory, is ‘stunningly unique’ Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. ‘O’Connell conjures up a world of almost Faulkerian richness and complexity,’ said People, and the Chicago Tribune wrote simply, ‘O’Connell has raised the standard for psychological thrillers.’ A wild child turned New York City policewoman, Mallory was adopted off the streets as a small girl. Very little has ever really been known about what happened to her back then, how she lived but the past is about to come alive. Crime School begins with the discovery of a woman found hanging in a burning apartment, tufts of her own blond hair stuck in her mouth and red candles scattered all around. Immediately, Mallory knows several things. The fire was set so the woman would be discovered. The crime is identical to another one twenty years old. And she knows this woman. She is a prostitute named Sparrow, who took her in all those many years ago, and then betrayed her. There is unfinished business between Mallory and Sparrow, and the quest to settle it will send her spinning back to a time of secrets and desperation, and into the mind of a criminal whose work has only just begun.

The Jury Must Die /Dead Famous

Night had fallen, and the woman looked down at the crumpled letter, as if, in absolute darkness, she could read the postscript: Only a monster can play this game. In Chicago, an FBI agent is killed in a psychiatrist’s waiting room. In New York, the jurors from a controversial trial are murdered one by one. The only connections between the two: a flamboyant shock jock, whose on air comments seem to be taking him dangerously close to the edge, and a woman, her body misshapen since childhood, whose job it is to clean up crime scenes and maybe to create them as well. This is a federal case, and Mallory’s been told that the FBI wants no part of her. But she knows something nobody else does and, besides, when has she ever cared what anybody else wanted?

Winter House

Carol O’Connell’s last novel, Dead Famous, made multiple best of year lists and won critical acclaim nationwide. ‘O’Connell brings a hard edge of greatness to the crime thriller,’ wrote the San Jose Mercury News. ‘A tough and brilliant action , wit , and surprise packed novel.’ But never has Mallory faced as many surprises as in the case before her now. It seems cut and dried at first: a burglar has been caught in the act and killed by an ice pick wielding homeowner. Except that the home owner turns out to be the most famous lost child in NYPD history, missing for almost sixty years, thought to have been kidnapped following the massacre of her family: five siblings, father, stepmother, nanny, and housekeeper nearly the entire household wiped out…
with an ice pick. Filled with the intricate plotting and extraordinary characterization that are O’Connell’s hallmarks, Winter House is her most powerful and most astonishing novel yet.

Find Me / Shark Music

From one of the most acclaimed crime writers in America comes her most astonishing novel: a story of love, loss, death and discovery.

Over the course of eight novels, Carol O’Connell and her protagonist, New York detective Kathy Mallory, have carved out a unique place for themselves. But all that has been prelude to the remarkable story told in Find Me.

A mutilated body is found lying on the ground in Chicago, a dead hand pointing down Adams Street, also known as Route 66, a road of many names. And now of many deaths. A silent caravan of cars, dozens of them, drives down that road, each passenger bearing a photograph, but none of them the same. They are the parents of missing children, some recently disappeared, some gone a decade or more all brought together by word that childrens’ grave sites are being discovered along the Mother Road.

Kathy Mallory drives with them. The child she seeks, though, is not like the others’. It is herself the feral child adopted off the streets, her father a blank, her mother dead and full of mysteries. During the next few extraordinary days, Mallory will find herself hunting a killer like none she has ever known, and will undergo a series of revelations not only of stunning intensity but stunning effect.

The Chalk Girl

The astonishing new Mallory novel from the New York Times bestselling author. The little girl appeared in Central Park: red haired, blue eyed, smiling, perfect except for the blood on her shoulder. It fell from the sky, she said, while she was looking for her uncle, who turned into a tree. Poor child, people thought. And then they found the body in the tree. For Mallory, newly returned to the Special Crimes Unit after three months’ lost time, there is something about the girl that she understands. Mallory is damaged, they say, but she can tell a kindred spirit. And this one will lead her to a story of extraordinary crimes: murders stretching back fifteen years, blackmail and complicity and a particular cruelty that only someone with Mallory’s history could fully recognize. In the next few weeks, she will deal with them all…
in her own way.

The Judas Child

Carol O’Connell has been consistently praised as a gifted storyteller Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the author of stylishly innovative San Francisco Chronicle, immensely affecting Miami Herald novels with an irresistible narrative force Publishers Weekly. Now, she gives us a stunning new creation. It is three days before Christmas, and two young girls have disappeared from the local academy. This hasn’t happened for fifteen years, since Rouge Kendall’s twin sister was murdered. The killer was found, but now Rouge, twenty five and a policeman, is forced to wonder: was he really the one? Also wondering is a former classmate named Ali Cray, a forensic psychologist with scars of her own. The pattern is the same, she says: a child called out to meet a friend. The friend is the bait, The Judas Child, and is quickly killed. But the primary victim lives longer…
until Christmas Day. Rouge doesn’t want to hear this. He’s spent the last fifteen years trying to avoid the memories: drinking alone, laying low, washing out of school and a promising first career. Now he might abandon law enforcement, too but something won’t let him, not yet. A little girl has haunted his dreams all these years and he has three days finally to put her to rest. Filled with the rich prose, resonant characters, and knife edge suspense that have won the author so many fans, Judas Child is Carol O’Connell’s most powerful novel yet.

Bone By Bone

A stunning stand alone novel from the national bestselling author who has raised the standard for psychological thrillers Chicago Tribune. Carol O Connell’s most recent Mallory novel, Find Me, was one of the most highly praised suspense novels of the year. A terrific find: a tightly wrapped, expert combination of suspense, mystery and show stopping character Janet Maslin of The New York Times; yet another example of the spot on talents of one of America s finest writers of mysteries Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. In Bone By Bone, however, she may have written her most unforgettable novel yet. In the northern California town of Coventry, two teenage brothers go into the woods one day, but only one comes back. No one knows what happened to the younger brother, Josh, until twenty years later, when the older brother, Oren, now an ex investigator for the Army CID, returns to Coventry for the first time in many years. His first morning back, he hears a thump on the front porch. Lying in front of the door is a human jawbone, the teeth still intact. And it is not the first such object, his father tells him. Other remains have been left there as well. Josh is coming home…
Bone By Bone. Using all his investigative skills, Oren sets out to solve the mystery of his brother s murder, but Coventry is a town full of secrets and secret keepers: the housekeeper with the fugitive past, the deputy with the old grudge, the reclusive ex cop from L.A., the woman with the title of town monster, and, not least of all, Oren himself. But the greatest secret of all belonged to his brother, and it is only by unraveling it that Oren can begin to discover the truth that has haunted them all for twenty years. Written with the rich prose, resonant characters, and knife edge suspense that have won the author so many fans, Bone By Bone is further proof that O Connell is one of the most poetic yet tough minded writers of the genre San Francisco Chronicle.