Winter House

A reclusive senior citizen kills an intruderbut there's more to the story. In Carol O'Connell's new novel New York City officer Kathleen Mallory purges a woman of her mysterious pastand the flesh-and-blood ghosts of a violent family legacy. From Publishers Weekly An ice pick is the murder weapon of choice in O'Connell's new noir featuring glacier-cool detective Kathy Mallory. A former homeless child-thief adopted by a kind-hearted New York cop, Mallory has parlayed her familiarity with the shady side of society into a successfulif somewhat unorthodoxcareer as a sleuth (she picks complex locks with aplomb and her investigative methods flirt with the limits of the law). When Nedda Winter, missing for 58 years following the massacre of her family at their New York mansion, reappears at the scene of the crimenow the site of a brand-new homicideMallory ("[s]till feral in many ways") digs her red lacquered nails right into the case. Cleo and Lionel Winter are mystified by their sister Nedda's return, certain they were the only survivors of the long-ago stabbing rampage. Mallory, working alongside sartorially challenged homicide detective Riker and psychologist Charles Butler, suspects the reason lies with Cleo's ex-husband, Sheldon Smyth, a slick estate lawyer with exclusive access to the Winter family's multimillion-dollar trust. But Smyth's dubious deeds are just the tip of the ice pick in the hands of O'Connell, known for her idiosyncratic characters and labyrinthine plots in eight previous thrillers including Mallory's Oracle and Dead Famous . Vivid prose keeps the pages turning in this intricate tale of betrayal, buried secrets and lives chopped short in the name of greed. Copyright Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Booklist The eighth entry in O'Connell's popular Kathy Mallory series feels strangely like an English country house shocker dropped into manic Manhattan. An intruder in a grand old mansion on Central Park West is fatally stabbed by Nedda Winter with a pair of scissors--or was it an ice pick, the very weapon used to massacre most of Nedda's family 60 years ago? The burglar turns out to be a serial killer caught by Mallory and inexplicably released on bail, impelling our poker-faced heroine to slam through the proceedings like very bad news, stirring up a gaggle of oddballs such as Bitty Smyth, Nedda's elfin niece whose dead-bolted room houses two shrines: one to God and one to genius, and series regular Charles Butler. Detective Riker, another regular, also takes a turn as an ice-pick murder buff. The individual stories are not very compelling, giving this walk-in closet full of enervated skeletons an air of unreality. Mallory fans and puzzle enthusiasts should appreciate the convoluted plot, but the title doesn't stand well on its own. David Wright Copyright American Library Association. All rights reserved When a serial lady-killer is found with shears sticking out of his chest and an ice pick in his hand, Kathy Mallory and her NYPD Special Crimes partner Detective Sgt. Riker are called in to investigate. One of the occupants of Winter House, the scene of the crime, is 70-year-old Nedda Winter, who immediately confesses to the killing, claiming it was self-defence. Murder solved, case closed. It's even poetic justice. But Winter House is the site of a massacre that took place 50 years previously and doesn't give up its dead so easily. Mallory and Riker will have to reopen the original investigation in order to try and stop the murderer from finishing what they started When a burglar is caught in the act and killed by an ice pick-wielding home owner, Mallory discovers that the home owner is actually a long-lost child who vanished sixty years earlier following the massacre of her entire family with an ice pick Kriminalroman. Kathy Mallory undersøger et tilsyneladende tilfælde af selvforsvar, som snart afdækker en masse hemmeligheder