It Happens in the Dark
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4.0 • 6 Ratings
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
The reviews called it “A Play to Die For” after a woman was found dead in the front row. It didn’t seem so funny the next night when another body was found—this time the playwright himself, his throat slashed. Detective Kathy Mallory of the NYPD Special Crimes Unit takes over, but isn’t getting a straight answer from anyone. Not the lead actor, a movie star fallen on hard luck; not the lead actress, a nervous sort with a dependence on pharmaceuticals; not even the wardrobe mistress, working under an alias; and certainly not the twin actors so unnervingly convincing playing psychos.
Now, backstage, someone has left Mallory a message on the blackboard: Tonight’s the night. Nothing personal. It appears that she is being written into the play itself, a play about a long-ago massacre that may not be fictional after all.
If Mallory can find out who’s responsible, heads will roll. Unfortunately, one of them might be her own.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
M is for Mallory Kathy Mallory, bestseller O'Connell's powerful and powerfully flawed New York Special Crimes Unit detective. M is also for morbid, macabre, and mordant adjectives that can be applied to the plot, the prose, and the humor of this dazzling 11th novel in the series (after 2012's The Chalk Girl). An audience death on opening night stops Peter Beck's play The Brass Bed, based on the slaughter of a Nebraska family, as does the discovery of Beck's bloody corpse in a front-row seat the next night. Add to the strange mix of cast members a mysterious ghostwriter working on the script who leaves taunting messages for Mallory. Mallory makes startling deductions; manipulates witnesses, suspects, and colleagues unsparingly; humiliates a brash official who tries to grab her case; and draws the smalltown sheriff who investigated the actual slayings to Manhattan. Her bravura performance wreaks justice both inside and outside the legal system. Author tour.
