M is for Mallory—Kathy Mallory, bestseller O’Connell’s powerful and powerfully flawed New York Special Crimes Unit detective. M is also for morbid, macabre, and mordant—adjectives that can be applied to the plot, the prose, and the humor of this dazzling 11th novel in the series (after 2012’s The Chalk Girl). An audience death on opening night stops Peter Beck’s play The Brass Bed, based on the slaughter of a Nebraska family, as does the discovery of Beck’s bloody corpse in a front-row seat the next night. Add to the strange mix of cast members a mysterious ghostwriter working on the script who leaves taunting messages for Mallory. Mallory makes startling deductions; manipulates witnesses, suspects, and colleagues unsparingly; humiliates a brash official who tries to grab her case; and draws the smalltown sheriff who investigated the actual slayings to Manhattan. Her bravura performance wreaks justice both inside and outside the legal system. Author tour. (Aug.)

Praise for Carol O’Connell and for the Mallory novels
“...among the best crime fiction ever written.”—San Jose Mercury News

“Mallory…is as fine a fictional creation as the crime genre offers.” —Janet Maslin, The New York Times

“O’Connell has raised the standard for psychological thrillers.”—Chicago Tribune

“Pop fiction’s most compelling mystery series…[by] one of America’s finest, but too often overlooked, writers of mysteries.”—Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

“Scores on all levels.”—Detroit Free Press

“Breaks the usual rules.”—The Baltimore Sun

“Easily one of the most original and striking crime fiction protagonists to appear in the last few years.”—St. Petersburg Times

“A hard-edged, brilliant, and indomitable heroine.”—San Francisco Chronicle

“Darkly stylish…highly original…This is great fun.”—Chicago Tribune

“A tight, twisting mystery.”—Newsday

“Beautifully written.”—Harper’s Bazaar

“Mallory is a marvelous creation.”—Jonathan Kellerman

“One of the most interesting new characters to come along in years.”—John Sandford

“One of the most unique, interesting, and surprising heroines you’ve ever come across in any work of fiction.”—Nelson DeMille

“An author who really involves you, and makes you care.”—James B. Patterson

“Wild, sly, and breathless—all the things that a good thriller ought to be.”—Carl Hiaasen

“One of those books you can’t put down.”—The Boston Globe

“An author who can raise goosebumps with both her plot and her prose.”—Detroit Free Press

Broadway's hottest ticket is a killer show—literally. When a woman dies of fright on opening night, the crowds flock in, but the next deaths are rather more deliberate. Enter Kathy Mallory, NYC's scariest detective, a borderline psychopath with little compassion but her own sense of justice, who was last seen in The Chalk Girl. She has no patience with the obfuscations and histrionics of the theater company. No one is telling the truth, but just how many crimes are they covering up? The play, which has uncanny ties to an actual murder, is being rewritten nightly by an unknown hand—and the ghostwriter is now targeting Mallory. Like all the Mallory novels, this one is a solid police procedural with a twisty plot, and Mallory is a fascinating, rich character. Adding to the fun is a turf war between cops and the portrayal of the Big Apple as gritty, dangerous, and corrupt instead of the sanitized Bloomberg version. VERDICT This may not be the easiest entry point for readers new to Mallory's dark world, but fans won't want to miss another solid mystery from O'Connell.—Devon Thomas, Chelsea, MI

The latest novel in the Detective Kathy Mallory series. On opening night of a Broadway play, a woman dies from a heart attack in a front-row seat. On the second night, a man's throat is cut--again, in the front row. "Oh, crap. Not again," moans a thespian. But the publicity is great--"a play to die for," crows the press. NYC detectives Mallory and Riker investigate, and they discover a full cast of strange people backstage--coke users, an actor with multiple personalities and a mysterious ghostwriter changing every line of the play. Because of the deaths, the play doesn't get past Act 1 for the first several performances. As for the novel itself, it's mainly a vehicle for showing off Mallory's odd personality. Sure, she'll get to the bottom of the violence, as all fictional detectives do. What makes her distinctive is the way she gets under the skin of friends and enemies alike--oh, wait, it's not so clear she has friends. She is consistently smarter than everyone else and routinely shows people up. OK, she went to a police academy, not charm school, and she's damned good at her job. This is a well-constructed mystery featuring an occasionally annoying heroine--at least one character would love to knock her head off with a baseball bat, while some readers may wish she would make some arrests and get it over with, already. The dialogue is clever, and the scenes are well-done, but somewhere in the middle, the story starts to drags. Pacing isn't paramount, and it's more important to showcase Mallory's talent for outsmarting people. Mallory fans won't be disappointed in her latest adventure, even though sections of the book could have been tighter.