Mallory's Oracle - Couverture souple

Jonathan Kellerman says Mallory's Oracle is "a joy." Nelson DeMille and other advance readers have called it "truly amazing, " "a classic" with "immense appeal." It is all of that, and more: a stunning debut novel about a web of unsolved murders in New York's Gramercy Park and the singular woman who makes them her obsession.

At its center is Kathleen Mallory, an extraordinary wild child turned New York City policewoman. Adopted off the streets as a little girl by a police inspector and his wife, she is still not altogether civilized now that she is a sergeant in the Special Crimes section. With her ferocious intelligence and green gunslinger eyes, Mallory (never Kathleen, never Kathy) operates by her own inner compass of right and wrong, a sense of justice that drives her in unpredictable ways. She is a thing apart.

And today, she is a thing possessed. Although more at home in the company of computers than in the company of men, Mallory is propelled onto the street when the body of her adoptive father, Louis Markowitz, is found stabbed in a tenement next to the body of a wealthy Gramercy Park woman. The murders are clearly linked to two other Gramercy Park homicides Markowitz had been investigating, and now his cases become Mallory's, his death her cause. Prowling the streets, sifting through his clues, drawing on his circle of friends and colleagues, she plunges into a netherworld of light and shadow, where people are not what they seem and truth shifts without warning. And a murderer waits who is every bit as wild and unpredictable as she....

Filled with deep, seductive atmosphere and razor-sharp prose, Mallory's Oracle is gripping, resonant suspense of tantalizing complexity—a genuinely unforgettable novel.

When Kathleen Mallory was ten she was a street kid and a thief. Then a cop called Markowitz took her home to her wife to civalize her. . . . Now Mallory is in charge of a complex database and a police officer herself, and someone has just murdered the man she considers her father -the only man she has ever loved. More used to the company of computers than people, Mallory descends into the urban nightmare of New York, to hunt down a cold-blooded killer. MALLORY'S ORACLE is a dangerous chase through the city's underworld, down the fibre-optic cables of high-tech computer networks and behind the blinds of genteel Gramercy Park - and an investigation into the chilly heart of it's damaged and elusive heroine.