4 DEAD BODIES ON THE NYC MAYOR'S LAWN? THIS LOOKS LIKE A JOB....FOR MALLORY!

BLIND SIGHT by Carol O' Connell continues the BQ's favorite mystery series featuring the stunning....and the stunningly dysfunctional, brilliant young Detective Kathy Mallory. (Never dare to call her Kathy....Mallory only). We've already raved on about these books in a previous post, so we couldn't wait to pounce on and devour this one in a matter of days. (Now, the depressing news...O'Connell takes her time with these novels....it's been three years since the last one, "It Happens In The Dark")

Mallory, a supermodel-like blonde with electric green eyes, functions as an almost unworldly, superhero figure within her Special Crimes Unit detective bureau. A ruthlessly efficient computer hacker with a killer wardrobe, a large caliber handgun and an ice cold, sociopath's thirst for justified vengeance, Mallory confounds, aggravates, and generally stuns everyone who comes in contact with her....suspects, fellow detectives and the murderers she hunts down. The pure joy of O' Connell's books comes from watching the unforgiving force-of-nature Mallory cut a swath through the convoluted, gruesome cases thrown in her path.

The plots that O'Connell challenges Mallory with are staggering in their mixture of heartbreaking tragedy and shocking violence.....and the complex storylines inevitably relate back to Mallory's own tortured childhood, spent roaming the streets of New York as an orphaned, feral street thief until caught and adopted(and only partially civilized)  by kindly New York detective Lou Markowitz. O'Connell always carefully rations out these nuggets of Mallory's horrendous backstory and you'll greedily gobble them up whenever they appear.

As we headlined, Mallory's new case involves four murdered kidnap victims, minus their hearts, dumped on the lawn of Gracie Mansion, currently occupied by Mayor Andrew Polk. Polk's a former Wall Street scumbag swindler and the horrific crime left on his front door may or may not throw suspicion on a group of one-percenters who lost millions in one of his trading scams. Adding to the mayhem....a poignant and harrowing subplot involving a 12 year old blind boy, the nephew of one of the murder victims. Mallory races to solve the case while the boy literally lives on borrowed time...., held captive by the monstrous hit man contracted to kill the random victims and slice out their hearts... for later mailing to the Mayor.

O'Connell's prose cuts as deeply as any writing you'd find in a lauded mainstream novel and ultimately, in her books' final pages, you see Mallory as O'Connell sees her.....as a star-crossed, potentially tragic figure. And Beached Quill counts "Blind Sight" among the very best of this series. Get your hands on this book ASAP.....and dive right into the others, if you haven't already. We give it a FIND OF FINDS....5 stars.