Toddled Dredge

When I try a mystery author unfamiliar to me, I rarely start with her first book. The first book is rarely the best, and I want to read the author’s best work first, if possible. I began reading Carol O’Connells’s series about detective Kathleen Mallory about eight years ago, and have enjoyed it so much that I thought it was time to read the book where it all started.

Many of the themes that occur throughout the series are also in the first book. Mallory is just as sociopathic, though her character is younger and less thoroughly herself in the first book. The love of her adoptive parents is still a powerful force on her life. The mystery of her character in the first book focuses more on determining whether she takes after her mother or her father more.

The book begins shortly after the murder of her adoptive father. Mallory, while grieving in her emotional hampered way, follows her father’s investigation of a series of murders, trying to figure out what he knew that got him killed. Her challenge is to know all he knew, without sharing his demise. She follows his clues into the world of illusionists, magicians and psychics, uncovering old and new murders.

A few flaws are present in the first of the series. The opening prologue is never adequately connected to the rest of the storyline - the author was a little too subtle. In later books, I was always a little frustrated by the magical way Mallory used the computer. She could hack into anything, but how was never explained. In this first novel, a few more details of the how are supplied, but they are inaccurate. You can’t electronically slip into someone else’s computer through the outlet, regardless of whether they are connected to the internet. certainly you couldn’t in 1995.

But the strengths of the later series are here as well: the interplay of callousness and mercy, truthfulness and deceit, faithful love and abandonment, friendship and isolation. Mallory is as bewitching as ever, and though Killing Critics and Stone Angel are probably the best written of the series, Mallory’s Oracle is still an a satisfying read.