Review: The Chalk Girl by Carol O'Connell

Title: The Chalk Girl

Series: Kathleen Mallory, #10

Author: Carol O'Connell

Genre/Audience: Suspense, mystery, adult

Publiation: Putnam, 2012

Source: For review, publisher

This is a guest review from my mom, Kim, who reviews for me occasionally, since we have very similar taste in books. :) Please welcome my mom!

Summary: The little girl appeared in Central Park; red-haired, blue-eyed, smiling, perfect - except for the blood on her shoulder.  It fell from the sky, she said, while she was looking for her uncle, who turned into a tree.  Poor child, people thought.  And then they found the body in the tree. 

For Mallory, newly returned to the Special Crimes Unit after three months lost time, there is something about the girl that she understands.  Mallory is damaged, they say, but she can tell a kindred spirit.  And this one will lead her to a story of extraordinary crimes; murders stretching back fifteen years, blackmail and complicity and a particular cruelty that only someone with Mallory's history could fully recognize.  In the next few weeks, she will deal with them all...in her own way.

(This summary is from the back of the book... we usually write up our own summaries, but I had a hard time summarizing this).

My thoughts:  Steph received this an an ARC from the publisher, who stated that even though this is the 10th in this series, it could be read as a stand-alone.  When I first started reading it, I really enjoyed it, particularly the character of Coco, the little red-haired girl.  I wanted to give her a hug and bring her home with me.  Once I got further into the book, I felt like I was a little lost, as there were a lot of characters introduced without a lot of explanation and there were alternate plots going on.  As far as the "Chalk Girl" in the title, I believe she was mentioned a couple times, but I'm not really sure of her relevance to the story.  I think there was a great book in here somewhere and with a little streamlining and some editing, it would have gotten there, but I was confused through much of the book.  I'm not sure if this is because I hadn't read the previous ones in the series or there was just too much going on.  I am intrigued by the main character of the series, Kathy Mallory, so I started reading the first book in the series last night.  I'm not too far into it yet, but I'll let you know how it goes.  I am holding off on a rating at this point, as I would like to give it a fair shot once I've read some of the others in the series.  So that would be my suggestion - start with book one in the series, Mallory's Oracle.  I'm assuming since the author made it all the way up to a doing a tenth book in the series, that it must be good, I just didn't get that from where I started.  I will keep you posted.