Stone Angel

by Carol O'Connell Narrated by Laural Merlington

Overview

NYPD sergeant Kathleen Mallory is drawn to a place far away from home. In a small town in Louisiana, she steps off the train. Within the hour, one man has been assaulted, another has had a heart attack, a third has been murdered, and Mallory is in jail, though she had nothing to do with any of these three events. She is there for an entirely different purpose.

Seventeen years earlier, Mallory's mother died in this town, stoned to death by a mob, and the six-year-old Mallory had disappeared, to reappear on the streets of New York. Now she's back to find out who killed her mother, and what happened to the body, vanished as well, its only trace a winged angel in the local cemetery.

Editorial Reviews

bn.com

The latest in an evocatively written series featuring free-spirited NYPD sergeant Kathleen Mallory has this odd, intriguing cop taking her act on the road to the rural Louisiana town where she was born. She's trying, at long last, to reach closure in the mysterious death of her mother -- stoned to death by villagers 17 years previous -- and must sift through the creepy, dangerous layers of the past to get answers.

—Rick Koster

People

NYPD Detective Sgt. Kathleen Mallory return[s] to her tiny Louisiana hometown after almost twenty years to solve the case that has obsessed her since childhood: the murder of her own mother...[O'Connell] conjures up a world of almost Faulknerian richness and complexity...peopled with characters every bit as compelling as those on Mallory's usual Manhatan beat. In Stone Angel, O'Connell's imagination truly takes wing.

San Francisco Chronicle

Unforgettable...Mallory makes a hard-edged, brilliant and indomitable heroine.

Milwaukee Journal

O'Connell's best book since her debut...a dark, Gothic tale of suspense, mystery and romance -- with just a touch of horror...O'Connell makes even the ordinary seem supernatural.

Kirkus Reviews

Seventeen years after her mother, Dr. Cass Shelley, was stoned to death by an angry mob in Dayborn (La.), Kathy Mallory, who fled the scene to become a New York street kid and, eventually, an NYPD sergeant, is back to find out who provoked the mob and what became of her mother's corpse. Since Mallory is Mallory, she's in town less than an hour on All Saints' Day when Ira Wooley, an autistic savant who was the world's most unreliable witness to the killing, has his hands savagely wounded; Deputy Travis, who's never told everything he knows about the killing, has his chance to talk cut off by a massive stroke; Babe Laurie, the revivalist who'd be a leading suspect if ancient cases had suspects, has been murdered; and Mallory is sitting in the pokey, thumbing her nose at dogged Sheriff Tom Jessop and lecturing acting deputy Lilith Beaudare about how to stand up to her boss. Mallory's loyal friend Charles Butler, following her down from the city with the idea of helping her out, naturally remains a consistent two leaps behind her, though he does get to spend time with some flavorsome locals—manly spinster Augusta Trebec, mute sculptor Henry Roth, enterprising innkeeper Betty Hale (who's turned the stoning into something of a local holiday), and the rest of the equally nasty Laurie clan—en route to a dizzyingly complicated windup involving spiritualism, child abuse, and good old-fashioned greed.

O'Connell (Killing Critics, 1996, etc.) adroitly borrows P.D. James's trick of working the frontier where homicide shades over into the routine of sudden death. But Mallory's fans will be disappointed by the supporting role she's elbowed into here.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169787078
Publisher:	Brilliance Audio
Publication date:	06/26/2009
Edition description:	Unabridged

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