The Judas Child (Mallory Novel) - Softcover

O'Connell, Carol

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0425238075 ISBN 13: 9780425238073

Publisher: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2010

Synopsis

It is three days before Christmas, and two young girls have disappeared from the local academy. This hasn't happened for fifteen years, since Rouge Kendall's twin sister was murdered. The killer was found, but now Rouge, twenty-five and a policeman, is forced to wonder: Was he really the one? Also wondering is a former classmate named Ali Cray, a forensic psychologist with scars of her own. The pattern is the same, she says: a child called out to meet a friend. The friend is the bait, the Judas child, and is quickly killed. But the primary victim lives longer...until Christmas Day.
Rouge doesn't want to hear this. He's spent the last fifteen years trying to avoid the
memories: drinking alone, lying low, washing out of school and a promising first career. Now he might abandon law enforcement too--but something won't let him, not yet. A little girl has haunted his dreams all these years--and he has three days finally to put her to rest.

About this title

Review:

Everyone knows that they caught the local child killer, and that formerly popular local priest Father Paul Marie is doing hard time. Everyone is so sure that, when 15 years later two little girls disappear, the police are sure that they have run away and will turn up soon. Everyone, that is, except for state police investigator Rouge, whose sister was the victim 15 years ago, and scarred beautiful criminologist Ali, who believes Father Paul Marie's claims of innocence. They have their own problems--why is his family broke, and what caused her scar? Things are not going as well as they might for the killer either; this particular pair of children have resources of pluck and ingenuity that constantly baffle him.

This is a departure for O'Connell; she has abandoned her usual detective, high-tech psychopath Mallory and her crew of misfits, for people less obviously extraordinary and brings the same skewed intelligent vision of human capability to bear on them. The switches between investigators trying to unravel past and present, and victims surviving against the odds, successfully wind up the tension to an almost unendurable pitch; O'Connell turns in a virtuoso combination of detection and suspense that is her best book yet. --Roz Kaveney

Review:

" 'A heart-stopping novel of intelligence and suspense' - Frances Fyfield, Mail on Sunday. 'Compulsive reading, a genuine page-turner in which the "whodunit" is only part of the puzzle' - The Times"

About this edition

• Publisher: G.P. Putnam's Sons
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0425238075
• ISBN 13: 9780425238073
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Number of pages: 420