Early on in this ninth Kathleen Mallory novel, O'Connell observes, "By definition, enigmas lacked clarity."
That oracular sentence perfectly captures the cloudy world of the Mallory novels, starring the most unlikely of
NYPD detectives, a "feral" child adopted and raised by another NYPD officer and his wife. The action here begins
with Mallory having disappeared from New York, and Riker, her partner, wondering if the dead woman in Mallory's
apartment is a suicide or the victim of the detective's long-feared sociopathic meltdown. Meanwhile, Mallory is
hurtling toward Chicago and mythic Route 66 in a VW Beetle ragtop pumped up on Porsche steroids. She's on the
trail of a serial child killer who shares her obsession with the road and has been burying the bodies of female
children along the fabled highway for decades. When Mallory's manic passage along 66 brings her to a forlorn
caravan of parents looking for their lost children under the leadership of a weary-and possibly weird-old
psychologist, Find Me quickly becomes a stunning novel of loss, anguish, psychosis, love, and redemption.
The narrative is onionlike: events, motives, and other narrative necessities are peeled away layer by layer.
Some layers work, others don't; a monumentally bent FBI agent leading a platoon of "body snatchers" ahead of
the caravan strains credulity. But the anguish of the sad searchers and Mallory's own obsession with 66, and
with her own lost childhood, simply require the reader to share the obsessions and see the story through to its
end. Dense, demanding, and very powerful.

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