(spoiler alert i wrote this for a discussion on a mailing list at a point in the discussion where spoilers were fair play. so as well as being lengthy it rather gives the plot away. you have been warned.)

Mallory is definitely a totally unreal and completely unique character. I haven’t come across a character like her and though I couldn’t say that I liked her that didn’t affect my enjoyment of the book at all. I liked the technique of having the main character being the loopy one.

What did bug me was that the main characters seemed like caricatures because they all had one feature too many. Mallory has her green eyes and stunning beauty, her lost childhood and her computer skills; Charles has his enormous nose, magical relatives and his eid-whatsit memory. Take one feature away from each character and they’d begin to be manageable. Both Markowitzes seemed similarly over the top. It felt to me as if the author didn’t know where to stop when she was trying to create unique characters.

I thought the secondary characters were better thought out, maybe because we only saw bits of them it was easier for my mind to make them into real people. Even the ones who were clearly not well balanced personalities, like the boy who played chess in the park or the minimalist living in Charles’ building, seemed that they would find a place in the real world. My favourites were the old ladies, I don’t care if it was unreal that they wouldn’t be scared of a serial killer, I liked their spirit.

There were parallels between the lives of Mallory and Charles in the book both being, in summary, weird kids with strange technical skills; I especially liked the way that both their childhood experiences came into the plot. Charles’ experiences with Max and Edith being part of the main plot and Mallory’s street life and subsequent upbringing by Louis and Helen setting up her strange ethical code. I can’t see them as a couple, I think Charles is good for Mallory but I don’t think Mallory is good for Charles.

I think Mallory was a thoroughly rubbish investigator and I loved the fact that she screwed stuff up. I don’t think she’d have made it into a police force in the real world. It kind of compensated for all the cops being in awe of her beauty that they were better at the job than her. I think she homed in on Gaynor so fast simply because he got the most money from the killings and that’s what Louis had said to look for and she was rather lacking in independent thought on the subject, the same kind of training that led her not to do things that would make Helen cry.

I was more interested in the old lady killings than the Markowitz one. I got a bit tired of Mallory and the Markowitzes and found Charles and the serial killings more interesting. I was convinced it was all going to end up having something to do with Max, mainly because I also found the death of the magician more intriguing than the other killings. The magic stuff was definitely one of my favourite parts of the book. I like the psychology of woo-woo stuff and how it affects people. Mallory’s reaction to the seance and Edith’s guillotine trick were two of the best bits in the book. These themes definitely enhanced the book for me. I hate it when books are about the genuine supernatural; I don’t believe in it and it’s one thing I can’t suspend my non belief in for fiction. So, conversely, when a book turns out to be about the non-genuine supernatural and its affect on people’s minds I love it. As a result I was sure Edith was up to some sort of tricks with her trance writing simply because I couldn’t take it as the real thing.

I loved Jon’s idea that the women could have arranged a suicide pact that would make them go down in history as the victims of a serial killer. A wonderful idea and what a pity it wasn’t the way the story worked out!

I thought all the stuff about the knife girl was good to start with but I got tired of it. She was so obvious a red herring that I thought she had to not be a red herring for a while. The same with Redwing, she wasn’t interesting enough for the part she had to play, there were too many details (dog, boy, hideouts, seances, etc) and not enough character.

The ending all got a bit convoluted and I couldn’t keep track of who was shooting who or what was going on and what all the motives were. The all action, all shooting, all racing to the scene bit seemed to be the wrong finale for the book. I didn’t think it was resolved very satisfactorily. Edith stood out to me as being mainly to blame, but I haven’t reread that bit to see if I can make sense of it.

I enjoyed the book on the whole and I’ll read another. Was this Carol O’Connell’s first book or just the first in this series? It seemed well written but I found many things over done, the plot was too complicated, there were too many characters, the main characters all had too many features. I want people to act and talk their way off the page, not just waggle their props at me to show me what they are like. I felt like the author was trying to impress me too much. It was a good book, it just could have been better.