Blind Sight by Carol O’Connell
Publisher – Headline
Published –Out Now
Price – £10.99 paperback £4.99 ebook
The nun is dead. Her body lies on the mayor's lawn with three others, all killed at different times, in different places, and dumped there. There should be five - but the boy is missing.
One second he was there...
Jonah Quill, blind since birth, sits in a car driven by a killer and wonders where they are going. Though blind, Jonah sees more than most people do. He's counting on this secret to save his life.
Then gone.
Detective Kathy Mallory is counting on herself to save his life. It takes her a while to realise that the missing-person case she is pursuing is so intimately connected to the massacre on the mayor's lawn. But she will find Jonah - she just hopes it will be in time.
So, this book was on my shelves for ten years. I have been reading this particular author since the late 1990s and annoyingly there has been no news since 2016 of another book. It is one of my favourites and most unusual crime series and I suspect where my love of unlikeable characters comes from. Today I’ll briefly talk about Blind Sight by Carol O’Connell but really, I’m booktempting the whole Mallory series.
The series centres on Kathy Mallory, known only as Mallory a detective in New York whose stepfather was a legendary chief of Detectives. Mallory was a street child that captured his heart, so he adopted and in Mallory’s Oracle Mallory has to investigate his murder. The one issue for most people is that Mallory appears to be a sociopath. Will happily steal anything, can hack any database she pleases, uses precise violence for her ends and very much does her own thing. It not unusual for a lead detective to be a rebel but Mallory is very much an enigma as to what she is up to. O’Connell rarely lets us enter her head we instead watch her actions and try to work out what game is being phrased. An early mystery was who Mallory really was and this story was actually revealed in the series just four books in. Did it change Mallory? Not that much but you may understand her more if you do read the books in sequence
Blind Sight has a typically macabre case to solve. Multiple people disappear including Jonah the young blind heir to a wealthy family. All bar the boy’s body are then found dead on the grounds of the New York Mayor. Why has a nun also vanished who it turns out is related to Jonah? Why is Jonah’s kidnapper so strange in what he says and does? Mallory is now assigned but is no fan of nuns since she was taught by them until the unfortunate incident of one getting a mysterious broken arm.
Throughout the books there is something of the theatrical to the crimes in Mallory novels. Magic tricks and superstition are constantly played with. Mallory the ultra-rationalist often has to attack these with savage delight. O’Connell likes to test the reader with deciding what is real and what is fakery as with most murder mysteries what we think we see and what we saw become quite key to the case. In this case a New York Street scene suddenly sees a man get attacked violently by a nun. This will get explained eventually, its key to the case but it’s the kind of weirdness O’Connell readers have got used to.
To Support Mallory are two recurring characters the slovenly, drunk but kindhearted Riker (Mallory’s opposite in many ways) and Charles Butler a longtime friend of Mallory whose bug-eyed appearance hides a skilled psychologist with a photographic memory, a deep affection for Mallory and absolutely no face for poker at all. They often are the angel’s on Mallory’s shoulder offering advice, angels and trying to stop her doing anything unusual – this rarely works but the relationships between these people are delights of dialogue and little actions that several books in you know how they will act and generally be found not to have been seeing what Mallory spotted.
This novel has another recurring theme in O’Connell’s work – it is always about money, and the most powerful people cannot be trusted. A hallmark of O’Connell is the outsiders are the people we tend to admire, and the respectable people are not to be trusted. In this case the Mayors of New York are in O’Connell’s sights and the way politicians use things for their own power get explored in a typically theatrical Mallory way, but it does mean even for Mallory she is up against a formidable group of powerful men. Against this we also have the enigmatic nun Angie a woman who left a wealthy home, had a criminal record and now is a nun. Mallory as always is convinced there is an angle being played here. This story asks us again who will be proved right. On this one I quite liked we had a bit of a score draw and I’ll leave it at that. This is the kind of detective who will live to the Church, make priests lie and cause havoc to get her aim
There is a fantastic level of tension as we have Jonah who is young and blind in a very dangerous situation with a very dangerous and strange captor. The story has menace and threat especially when we see the early body count and there is a little inverted cat and mouse as Jonah tries to work out how to get the situation to his advantage.
If there is one drawback in any procedural its you generally know all will be ok. Mallory is a force of nature so once she is ready, she will win and here is a touch of this being a standard Mallory story. A lot of fu but nothing really changed by the end in terms of the core cast and their relationships. As such since no more books have been issued for nearly ten years I now wonder have I finished the series at last, or do I keep searching like I do every month for some news of another story. Mallory would like that open-ended torture I think!
