I must admit to being intrigued by the fact that the publishers have seized on the Steig Larsson angle, with the tagline "Before Lisbeth Salander, there was Kathy Mallory." In some ways you can't blame them: after all, O'Connell's books feature a heroine who is damaged by childhood abuse, socially malajusted and a computer genius (albeit one who comes in a far more conventionally attractive package - O'Connell is at pains to repeatedly point out how beautiful and expensively turned out Mallory is).
In truth, though, that's pretty much where the similarity ends. O'Connell writes smart New York thrillers that are basically police procedurals (despite Mallory's occasionally fractious relationship with law enforcement, she is - most of the time - a cop). So not a whole lot of similarity to the Scandi sexual and political thriller, then (though, interestingly, she does touch on some of the same misogyny that Larsson covered - the US title for one of the books was The Man Who Lied to Women, not massively far off from the Swedish title for the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, "Men Who Hate Women").
O'Connell also makes the mistake that Larsson did of falling a little too in love with his characters: just as he gave Salander a ridiculous boob job (in what was possibly the most ill-conceived, out of character gesture I've read in a long time, seemingly inserted to make her more conventionally feminine) and made Blomkvist so devilishly attractive, despite his flaws, that pretty much every woman in the books wants to sleep with him. The Mallory books are falling, too, under the weight of their heroine's perfection: damaged she may be, but everyone she meets is at least half in love with her, she gets away with everything and she survives ground-breaking revelation after ground-breaking revelation about her past without so much as a flicker, never mind any actual character development. (So I must admit, keen as I am to read this new book, I am wary of setting my expectations too high...)
As a writer myself, I must admit I'm always fascinated by how books are marketed in an increasingly crowded market place: and I'm not immune (only recently I bought a book because it was pitched with 'if you like Jim Butcher you'll like this'). But sometimes the choices seem almost odd - like the recent rebranding of Jonathan Kellerman's Alex Delaware books, which now all bear the slogan 'Alex Delaware is the Crime Reader' - a clear hope that someone will make a movie or TV show with that title, which seems to have sprung from nowhere on a series that has been going for decades). Still, will be interesting to see what readers who fallen for the complicated charms of Salander make of the glacial untouchability of Mallory. If you've read both, do let me know...
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