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If the paintings of former artist, Carol O'Connell, are as good as her novels, it is a wonder she ever deserted Art in favour of full time writing. Mallory's Oracle was O'Connell's first published novel, although she admits to having created her unique character, Kathy Mallory, in an earlier, unpublished story. The first published work met with well deserved success and was followed by The Man Who Lied to Women , Killing Critics, Flight of the Stone Angel, Shell Game and the stand alone Judas Child . Each of the Mallory novels doles out gobbets of information on the enigmatic, hard and almost unsympathetic protagonist yet O'Connell always finds more information with which to tantalise her readers. Mallory - to only a few is she known as Kathy - is watched over, admired, despaired of and loved by an odd assortment of characters as she goes about solving crimes. As she pursues miscreants she is put into many dangerous situations and the perils of her childhood are revealed in the process. Crime SchoolÝ opens with the theft of a paperback Western by a prostitute, Sparrow. Sparrow is stalked then apparently murdered. She is strung up by the unknown stalker, but she is not completely dead. She is resuscitated by young policeman Deluthe but remains in a coma for most of the duration of the book. Mallory and her partner, aging alcoholic but more than competent Riker, see a parallel between the hanging of Sparrow and the murder of another woman some twenty years previously. All the other mainstay characters of the earlier Mallory books are brought into play : Coffey, the wonderful Charles Butler, Slope and others. Lou Markowitz, Mallory's dead foster father is, as usual, an integral part of the plot. Sparrow had loved and cared for the child Kathy as much as she had been able. For reasons that are revealed toward the conclusion of the book, Mallory became her implacable enemy, yet Sparrow continued to love her. Riker, who had been a good friend to Sparrow, his sometime informant, genuinely suffers as a result of the damage done to the woman and Mallory's attitude toward her. Despite Lieutenant Coffey's insistence that there is no justification in treating the decades old case - which sees the introduction of retired detective Geldorf - and the brutal attack on Sparrow as a single enquiry, Mallory and Riker, assigned to the old investigation, manage still to pursue the contemporary crime as well as the one which they feel provided the genesis of the more recent killings. O'Connell writes evocatively and sympatrhetically of the traumas that transformed the young child into the sociopathic detective of the modern day. Her descriptions of the stalking of the various women are harrowing. She is not one, alas, to shy away from sickening destails yet the rewards for ploughing through those descriptions to read the entire tale are great. Many of O'Connell's characters are psychologically damaged almost beyond belief yet the story exerts an hypnotic effect on the reader. There is a jerky feel to the prose and an emphasis on unspoken communication that is worthy of Frank Herbert's characters in his Dune series. Nothing is simple and the connection between the old case and the perpetrator of the new crime is extremely moving. Mallory's understanding of the modern day criminal belies her much vaunted lack of emotion. One scene involving the prostitutes who knew Mallory as a child is at once funny and very poignant. For anyone who enjoyed the earlier Mallory books yet found Shell Game to be disappointing, don't give up on the series. While the plot is as circuitous as ever and some scenes approach perilously close to melodrama, this adventure is not one to be missed. Note: This review is based on the edition published by Hutchinson in London.
Reviewed by Denise Wels, September 2002
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