From Publishers Weekly
When the death toll of serial killer "Mack the Knife" exceeds 100 victims along historic Route 66 in America's heartland, Kathy Mallory, on vacation from her job with the NYPD, decides to give the locals a hand in bestseller O'Connell's exciting ninth thriller to feature the frosty, unapproachable detective (after 2004's Winter House). Aided by her longtime partner Riker and police psychologist Charles Butler, Mallory butts heads with just about everyone, pursuing the case as if it were hers and hers alone. She makes little progress until the killer starts leaving a new calling card, depositing fresh kills on the highway, all with one hand chopped off and replaced with the tiny hand bones of a previous victim pointing to a new grave. Stylish prose and a magnetic lead character more than compensate for an overly complicated plot that drags in spots, particularly in the second half. For readers who have never followed Mallory, this is as good a time as ever to get acquainted. Author tour. (Jan.)
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From Booklist
Early on in this ninth Kathleen Mallory novel, O'Connell observes, "By definition, enigmas lacked clarity." That oracular sentence perfectly captures the cloudy world of the Mallory novels, starring the most unlikely of NYPD detectives, a "feral" child adopted and raised by another NYPD officer and his wife. The action here begins with Mallory having disappeared from New York, and Riker, her partner, wondering if the dead woman in Mallory's apartment is a suicide or the victim of the detective's long-feared sociopathic meltdown. Meanwhile, Mallory is hurtling toward Chicago and mythic Route 66 in a VW Beetle ragtop pumped up on Porsche steroids. She's on the trail of a serial child killer who shares her obsession with the road and has been burying the bodies of female children along the fabled highway for decades. When Mallory's manic passage along 66 brings her to a forlorn caravan of parents looking for their lost children under the leadership of a weary--and possibly weird--old psychologist, Find Me quickly becomes a stunning novel of loss, anguish, psychosis, love, and redemption. The narrative is onionlike: events, motives, and other narrative necessities are peeled away layer by layer. Some layers work, others don't; a monumentally bent FBI agent leading a platoon of "body snatchers" ahead of the caravan strains credulity. But the anguish of the sad searchers and Mallory's own obsession with 66, and with her own lost childhood, simply require the reader to share the obsessions and see the story through to its end. Dense, demanding, and very powerful. Thomas Gaughan
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