Find Me (Hardcover)

by Carol O'Connell (Author)
Key Phrases: caravan parents, portable siren, blue pouch, Dale Berman, New York, Charles Butler (more...)

Editorial Reviews

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.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Putnam Adult (December 28, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0399153950
• ISBN-13: 978-0399153952
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.3 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (53 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #418,826 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the best of the series so far, December 31, 2006

By	ellen "ellen in atlanta" (Atlanta, Georgia USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

Since the first Mallory book, Mallory's Oracle, we get bits and pieces about the 'Baby Thief' - she was alone, feeding out of trash cans, sleepng where she could. She was taken in by Helen and Louis Markowitz, and finally the girl found safety and love. But she never forgot why she had to live in the streets. She had a telephone # written on her hand, partially blurred. She would call all variations of that # and say 'Hi it's Kathy. I'm lost.' But no connections came from those calls..The Markowitzs gave her love and safety, but...
When the Markowitz's are gone, Mallory has a career as a Detective with NYPD. Her only friends are her foster father's poker buddies, including Charles Butler and Detective Riker, also with NYPD.
Mallory is missing from work and Riker gets a call that someone has been found dead in Mallory's apartment. When Charles and Riker go into Mallory's computer room, they find she unlocked the puzzle of the partial telephone number, and has a clue to her childhood. And so begins her journey.
Mallory has been given letters her father wrote, addressed to 'OB'. They show his passions - a silver suped up Beetle, and traveling the old Route 66. She follows his journey down the old road in her own version of a suped up Beetle. But she is not alone - there are families of lost children following that path to find their lost ones. There have been children's skeletons found on the route, and someone seems to have been using that road to kill lost children. Mallory joins them and becomes part of the team to solve this mystery. A lost child trying to find her people..Butler and Riker find her and follow also.
Here comes the rub - there is more info on the caravan, the lost ones, the FBI participants, it becomes 'ad nauseum'.
But do not give up on this book, for it will solve the mystery Mallory has been looking for. I have been reading the Mallory books since the beginning, and the answers from previous books are there.
The ending is so worth getting through the caravan stuff. We see Mallory as no one has seen her before. How this ending will effect subsequent books, one can only speculate. But speculate you will.
A must for Mallory fans.

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Mallory is back and O'Connell is in top form, February 11, 2007

By	A Reader "snailgate" (Newark, DE United States) - See all my reviews

Another reader complained that it took them a week to read this one instead of a day or two like the others. Me too. And that was great. Some of the later books in the series have been real pager turners--just slightly better-than-average routine pot-boilers. This one is a return to the strangeness and tension of the earliest Mallory novels. I had trouble reading more than two pages at a time. It was just too intense. I had to stop and let my own reaction to what I was reading settle down. My only problem was the beetle convertible hot-rod. 220 mph?!? No way! it would be airborne long before that speed.

This not a typical police procedural, murder mystery, or even as the jacket calls it, a psychological thriller. If you are looking for one of those, it will be a disappointment. It rewards the reader in an entirely different way.

But it was a most satisfactory read.

20 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Not for everyone, January 14, 2007

By	Mick McAllister - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

The latest Mallory novel is generating some controversy. Does the plot signal an end to the series? Is the story too disjointed, too confusing? Myself, I enjoyed the book, though my patience wore thin sometimes as the cross-country exploration of Route 66 began to feel repetitious. In some ways, Find Me is a mirror/opposite of Stone Angel, Mallory's other venture from New York into her own history. Where Stone Angel is so rich and entertaining that we don't much care how it ends, Find Me provides an ending so brilliant that it excuses any tedium getting there.

The "mystery" of why Kathy is on the road isn't all that mysterious. The reader knows after a few pages that she is looking for her father -- in some sense. What we don't know is whether her father is a serial killer also obsessed with Route 66. Will Kathy find her father and then arrest him?

O'Connell has always done an excellent job of making others -- not just Kathy and her crew, but the most minor characters -- more interesting than the killer. Here she pushes that element to a daring extreme that may be the reason for some of the confusion and disappointment. No way to explain that without spoilers; suffice it to say that the encounter between Kathy and the killer is one of the most memorable of any mystery endings I've ever read.

O'Connell has always had her sights on something more ambitious than whodunits, and every book carefully balances Mallory's story with the suspense of tracking the killer. In every novel, the killer is revealed to be a person of no consequence beyond their impact, like a shark's, on their victims. They are creatures of eccentric banality, to twist Hannah Arendt's famous words. Here is no exception.

Mallory's world is a cartoon universe, where everyone is a bit simpler and stranger than we are used to in the real world. It is a style, like the cartoons of William Hogarth or Francisco Goya, meant to capture essentials quickly and precisely. It works, but for some readers Kathy -- and reality -- are too important to be "reduced" to cartoons. Get out of that mindset, and you will enjoy your trip on Route 66.