In Kathleen Mallory, Carol O’Connell created one of the most distinctive characters in the mystery–thriller world. Mallory is brilliant, relentless, and shaped by a brutal childhood—raised on New York streets until Officer Louis Markowitz took her in. She grows into an NYPD detective with a ferocious intelligence, an icy focus, and a small orbit of people who care about her: Riker, Charles Butler, Jack Coffey, and Markowitz’s old poker pals.
The Story
It Happens in the Dark (#11) drops Mallory and Riker into a Broadway theater where “a play to die for” keeps stopping for all the wrong reasons. Night one: an audience member dies during Act I. Night two: the playwright’s throat is slashed—suicide or murder? The production is somehow a hit and no one has even seen Act II. As Mallory digs, it turns out the script isn’t the playwright’s anymore—a ghostwriter has been rewriting it piece by piece. Now every cast and crew member is a suspect: a once-famous movie star, a troubled leading lady, a wardrobe mistress who isn’t what she seems, a gofer with secrets, and a pair of brothers as unhinged as the roles they play.
Final Thoughts
When I first discovered Mallory, I tore through the first six books. Then came a lull—#7–#9 still sit on my TBR stack. I picked the series back up with The Chalk Girl (#10) and then this one. I loved being back with Mallory, Riker, Charles, and the gang, but this entry didn’t land quite as hard for me. The plot threads were occasionally hard to track (I mixed up the two crew members and the two psychos at one point), the pacing sagged, and the culprit felt a bit easy to spot—the real question became “why?” more than “who?”
That said, the series remains terrific because the characters remain terrific. Some readers complain Mallory hasn’t changed much over time; my take is: why mess with a good thing? (Has Stephanie Plum changed that much?) When O’Connell’s machinery hums, Mallory is a force of nature and impossible to look away from.
Grade: B+ • Book #25 for 2014
