Carol O’Connell-Crime School
A wild child turned New York City policewoman, Mallory was adopted off the streets as a small girl. Very little has ever really been known about what happened to her back then, how she lived-but the past is about to come alive. “Crime School” begins with the discovery of a woman found hanging in a burning apartment, tufts of her own blond hair stuck in her mouth and red candles scattered all around. Immediately, Mallory knows several things. The fire was set so the woman would be discovered. The crime is identical to another one twenty years old. And she knows this woman. She is a prostitute named Sparrow, who took her in all those many years ago, and then betrayed her. There is unfinished business between Mallory and Sparrow, and the quest to settle it will send her spinning back to a time of secrets and desperation, and into the mind of a criminal whose work has only just begun.

Killing Critics by Carol O’Connell
Dean Starr a performance artist. Makes a name for himself. When he’s stabbed at a gallery during one of his more memorable pieces. Then audience liked it-until they realized how authentic Starr’s art as death routine is. Det Kathleen Mallory see,s a connection between Starr,s stabbing and another cold-case murder of a promising young dancer from twelve years ago. Her beloved stepfather was the investigator on that earlier unsolved case. But the deeper Mallory gets in to the past the more she realizes .Just how dark and dangerous it can be


The Man Who Cast Two Shadows by Carol O'Connell
The badly beaten and decomposed body of a tall blonde woman is found in a New York City park, and when a label inside her blazer states it belongs to Kathleen Mallory the entire NYPD seems to find out in minutes that Mallory is dead. It isn’t till her erstwhile partner Riker actually sees the body that he can – with great relief – correct the ID – by which time the press has already gotten the news … The connection makes this personal for Mallory, and – suspension or no suspension (a separate entity from her bereavement leave of the first book), assignment or no assignment, she will be investigating this murder.The actual victim becomes another character in the cast, as Mallory discovers an unfinished novel on her computer which seems to be her own thinly veiled story – a tale of seduction, pregnancy, and loss, terminating abruptly in midsentence with the words YOU LIAR typed over and over. Mallory is certain that whoever the other half of the victim’s real-life affair was had to be the killer; from there it is a matter of determining which of a handful of suspects he is, and what the lie was.