Kathy Mallory

NYPD sergeant Kathleen Mallory - computer genius, street fighter, provocative waif, peerless investigator, manipulative beauty - is the gorgeous, near-sociopathic heroine 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.

NYPD sergeant Kathleen Mallory is drawn to 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.

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 homeowner turns out to be the most famous lost child in NYPD history, missing for almost 60 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.

A caravan of cars drives down Route 66, each passenger bearing a photograph. They are the parents of missing children, all brought together by word that children's grave sites are being discovered along the road. Kathy Mallory drives with them. The child she seeks, though, is herself. During the next few days, she will find herself hunting a killer like no one she has ever known, and will undergo a series of revelations of stunning intensity and effect.

New York Times best-selling author Carol O’Connell has won a wide fan base with her popular novels starring NYPD detective Kathy Mallory. In The Chalk Girl, a little girl is abandoned in Central Park—with her uncle’s body in a tree not far away. Recognizing a kindred spirit in the girl, Mallory takes the case. But her investigation soon leads to a trail of murder and blackmail spanning 15 years.

The reviews called it "A Play to Die For" after the woman was found dead in the front row. It didn't seem so funny the next night, when another body was found - this time the playwright's, his throat slashed.

Detective Kathy Mallory takes over, but no matter what she asks, no one seems to be giving her a straight answer. The only person - if "person" is the right word - who seems to be clear is the ghostwriter. Every night, an unseen backstage hand chalks up line changes and messages on a blackboard. And the ghostwriter is now writing Mallory into the play itself, a play about a long-ago massacre that may not be at all fictional.

The nun was dead. Her body lay on the lawn outside Gracie Mansion, the home of New York City's mayor, and it wasn't alone. There were four of them altogether. They'd been killed at different times, in different places, and dumped there. There should have been five - but the boy was missing. Jonah Quill, blind since birth, sat in a car driven by a killer and wondered where they were going. Though he was blind, Jonah saw more than most people did. It was his secret, and he was counting on that to save his life.