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A powerful stab to the heart of matters
By Carol O'Connell (Putnam, 306 pp., $24.95) Buy at Amazon
Reviewed by John Orr
Family is an issue in lots of mysteries. The detective discovers the victim or the
murderer is his or her spouse, son, daughter, father, mother or psychotic split personality.
The detective's child, lover or dog is kidnapped by the creep. The cop neglects his own family
to stop a serial killer and saves the town but goes home to find a note and empty closets.
But no mystery author I've read writes with more truthful emotional intensity about family
issues than Carol O'Connell in her peerless Kathy Mallory series.
In the latest, ''Winter House,'' Detective Mallory seems almost a mere sideshow to the
impassioned story of the Winter family, which has been haunted for decades by the massacre of
five siblings, their father, stepmother, nanny and housekeeper. All of whom had died from
wounds made by an ice pick wielded by a killer the police called the Stick Man.
When this novel opens, a survivor of that horrible night -- then a child, now an elderly
woman -- is back in that same house, which is filled with police investigating her for having
stabbed an intruder to death with a pair of scissors.
Most of the cops want to give the old woman a medal -- the man she'd killed was a murderer
they'd already been tracking. But among the cops on the scene is Mallory, ice water in her
veins and brilliance in her brain, who has figured out the scissors were a ruse -- the bad guy
had been stabbed first with an ice pick.
And the old woman who has copped to the killing is Nedda ''Red'' Winter, who disappeared
after that long-ago massacre, and has only recently returned to Winter House. She'd been saved
from an institution by her niece Bitty, only to be very coldly received by her sister --
Bitty's mother -- and brother. Her siblings, perhaps, blame her for the Stick Man killings. Or,
perhaps, they just don't want her taking her share of their inheritance.
Suddenly Mallory and her partners, Detective Sergeant Riker and eidetic genius Charles
Butler, are investigating not only the killing of a killer, but also a massacre more than 50
years old. And, if Riker's right, a mystery going back even farther: ''Eventually, he would
have to tell her that Stick Man's killings had begun in 1860.''
As if that weren't enough, it seems the house itself may be malevolent. At one point Nedda
goes to the basement, accompanied by ghosts of those killed when she was a child, including
the housekeeper, Mrs. Tully. She sees a mouse on a sill, under a window held up by a stick.
''And though the wind had ceased and there was no visible agency to move the propping stick,
the stick did fall. The slamming wood frame broke the back of the mouse. Its mouth opened wide
and, in surprise, it died. Mrs. Tully laughed.''
That's pure O'Connell, of course. She uses a line from James Joyce's ''Ulysses'' about
Bloom's cat to describe Mallory: ''Cruel. Her nature. Curious mice never squeal. Seem to like
it.'' But that's part of the fun and charm of O'Connell's novels overall, not just Mallory.
It's a complicated story, one in which the hard-hearted Mallory, warm-hearted Riker and
downright mushy Butler are often at odds as they track historic murders, old and new financial
arrangements and just where the heck Nedda's been all these decades. The story is held
together by O'Connell's usual witty, bravura writing, and by emotional power almost never
found in other mysteries.
The brilliance of this novel is in the exploration of the feelings and motives of Nedda and
Bitty, especially, and how they influence the Mallory/Riker/
Butler team. O'Connell fans, who've come to expect a lot from her, will still be knocked out
by this one.
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