Customer Reviews

Find Me: A Mallory Novel

5 star:		(34)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

I think you're either gonna like 'Find Me' or hate it. I liked it - very much. I believe O'Connell is continually developing a three-dimensional character and a fascinating one. Is Mallory a sociopath? I keep changing my opinion on that. I didn't find the large cast of characters confusing nor any more unbelievable than the Mallory literature discussion group of hookers. (Didn't ya love that - Sheriff Peety?) It took me a while to realize what Mallory was doing on Route 66, ie, to connect it to the letters, but I usually read Mallory books with a puzzled look on my face anyway. I always love the droll comments and observations, and I'm pleased that Mallory approved of Kansas (square fields and perfect right angles) as that's my home state. Wish there had been a little more of much put-upon Lt Coffey, bless his heart. :-)

Wow so many negative reviews for "Find Me"! I was really surprised, cause personally, I loved this book. I a huge fan of Kathy Mallory and all the books, and I think this, while not up there with my all time fav, (Flight of the Stone Angel), i think it was both fitting and satisfying. Like 'Stone Angel', i love the stories about Mallory's past, and this is no different. The ending WAS shocking, but it ties up heaps of loose ends. I for one, had never given Mallory's father much thought, only Cassandra.
So do read it, it's worth it, especially to find out what happens at the end. While it doesn't have the excitment of the New York based novels, it's still an excellent read.

Let's hope this isn't the last we see of Kathy Mallory!

I totally enjoyed this latest in the Mallory series. I could not put it down and read to the end in the wee hours of the morning.

As each book progresses, we see more and more into the psyche of Mallory and how she came to be who she is now. This book ties up quite a few loose ends. Mallory actually seems more human and less robotic. Her obsessions are understandable, as are her fears and questions. We grieve with the fourteen year old Mallory for the loss she felt so long ago.

We let our emotions run amok with the parents on the caravan, and we lose our patience with the FBI characters who are no more than little followers of their leader who has his own agenda.

My only concern is that this wil be the last Mallory. So many story lines were concluded, so many endings to the ongoing storylines, that I fear we are losing my favorite character. The O'Connell books are the only ones I buy first editon hardbacks, and yes, I do re-read them.

I can only hope that Mallory will continue her crime fighting ways with her own unique sense of justice and right vs. wrong.

Perhaps now that some ghosts have been laid to rest, she will be able to grow emotionally and can finally feel the joys and love that normal people experience. I only hope that Charles is there to reap the benefits. I know Riker will be around. I worry about Charles.

I have read all her books and have enjoyed each of them. This one is the best yet. She actually makes Mallory human and the story hummed right along with each character an individual with a story of their own.
Would highly recommend this book.

There is a dead woman in her apartment and NY detective Kathy Mallory has taken off in a VW Beetle with a Porsche 911 engine to travel old Route 66. At the beginning of the highway, the intersection of Adams and Marshall in Chicago, lays a body with its hand pointing down the road. As Mallory is in search of her past, her friends Riker and Charles Butler, are after Mallory and join with a caravan of cars driven by the parent s of missing children brought together by the discovery of children's graves discovered all along this famous road.

Reading O'Connell is such a pleasure. In Mallory she has created one of the most interesting female characters written and then added Riker as her friend and partner who loves her as she is, and Charles who just loves her, much to his detriment. In her usual style, O'Connell gives us a layered story of Mallory's search, the parent's plight and the battle of jurisdiction and corruption of the lead investigator. There is tragedy on many levels, humor to lighten things along the way, twists to keep the reader on their toes, and the metamorphosis of Mallory. Is this the end of the series? I certainly hope not, but as long as O'Connell keeps writing, I could bear it. I enjoyed everything about this book, include Route 66, some of which I have driven, and highly recommend it.

Introduced in MALLORY'S ORACLE, Carol O'Connell's debut novel, Kathleen Mallory and her origins have been as mysterious as some of her cases. FIND ME, O'Connell's latest work, provides Mallory and her fans with some answers.

This complex and occasionally murky work begins with Mallory's unexplained absence from her position as a New York City homicide detective. Detective Sergeant Riker, Mallory's erstwhile police partner, visits her apartment in an effort to discover the reason for her being away. What he finds, however, is the body of an unknown woman, dead from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound, and the beginning of not one but two mysteries that slowly and excruciatingly will unravel across thousands of miles of legendary highway.

Mallory is in pursuit of two haunting enigmas. One is of a monster who has murdered over 100 innocents, leaving their bodies scattered in a seemingly random pattern across the western half of the United States. The other is the father she never knew, a man whose only legacy is a series of letters that, in their way, serves as a starting point to the solution to both puzzles. The common element that the two mysteries share is Route 66, the idealized, iconic link between Chicago and Los Angeles. For years the serial killer has been kidnapping children and burying them along the unmarked, disappearing highway. Mallory's absentee father, meanwhile, had sent before her birth a series of descriptive essays from various points along Route 66, providing a visual and (in some cases) aural guidebook.

The beginning of Mallory's journey is cursed with a murder, as a body is discovered in Chicago at the famous eastern origin of Route 66. Mallory, the adult seeking her phantom, unknown father, joins an ever-growing caravan of parents traveling along the highway searching for their missing children. She brings an almost psychopathic relentlessness to her pursuit, as clues ebb, flow and dovetail. Riker, pursuing Mallory in an effort to help and protect, is an almost hapless presence for Mallory, as are a number of other characters from past installments in the series, who are more or less along for the ride. It is, however, primarily through their eyes that FIND ME is told, as Mallory, almost to the very end, is an enigmatic presence, more a driven force of nature than a protagonist who readers can ever really come to know.

As FIND ME progresses, we learn --- as Mallory has intuited, perhaps all along --- that the killer is among the parents' hopeful, sorrowful caravan and that he is manipulating not only their journey but also the investigation. Yet, by the time the reader discovers the killer's true identity, who he isn't is in some ways more important than who he is, so that the revelation is somewhat anti-climactic. What ultimately makes the effort of reading the novel more than worthwhile, however, is the solution to Mallory's other puzzle, one that in its occurrence and aftermath is stirring and, in this darkest of tales, most welcome.

FIND ME leaves Mallory, and possibly O'Connell, at a crossroads. It is a perfect place to end the series and yet could also provide a jump point for a new direction to the series. While it is doubtful that the book will attract new readers to this complex, enigmatic character and storyline, fans will find their long infatuation with Mallory rewarded, and then some.

---Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub

I really debated giving this four stars because I like this series--I like it a *lot*--and O'Connell usually works magic with her unusual premise. But the mystery in this one is just too wildly convoluted to carry the other drawback. Sad to say, it's the characters. Another reviewer noted that the whole series has a cartoonish larger-than-life quality; I agree, and weirdly enough it complements O'Connell's tragic themes. The delicate willing suspension of disbelief buckled too many times--very annoying, and suprising for this series--and the plot wasn't enough to sweep me along on its own.

Usually I love wandering through O'Connell's spooky, twisty plots while relishing the revelations about Mallory, Charles, Riker and the various vivid side characters. For the first time I got just plain sick and tired of how overblown Mallory is. She's so beautiful, so brilliant, so damaged and tragic...yeah, got it already. Every supporting character is too willing to sacrifice careers, integrity and and even lives out of hopeless love for someone who treats them vilely. Even the people who love her are terrified of her. They call her "brat" and feel so guilty when they rightly suspect her of being a violent sociopath, they forgive and enable her iciness...and for the first time my primary reaction was a reluctant, "Oh bullpucky".

This isn't a pan of the book. It won't attract many new fans but those already hooked on the series may find enough development to satisfy their jones. I was suprised at the welcome hint of healing at the ending, so the series probably has some mileage left. I just hope next time O'Connell tightens up her plotting and ratchets back the Mallory-worship. So...this book is a fairly good entry in an unusual, risk-taking series with some genuinely excellent titles.