Brooklyn Seniors

Therapy (Alex Delaware)

Description

Jonathan Kellerman has made the psychological thriller his own gripping province with his bestselling series of Alex Delaware novels. Now, Delaware’s new adventure leads the sleuthing psychologist on a harrowing exploration into the realm he knows best: the human psyche, in all its complexity, mystery, and terrifying propensity for darkness.

“Been a while since I had me a nice little whodunit,” homicide detective Milo Sturgis tells Alex Delaware. But there’s definitely nothing nice about the brutal tableau behind the yellow crime-scene tape. On a lonely lover’s lane in the hills of Los Angeles, a young couple lies murdered in a car. Each bears a single gunshot wound to the head. The female victim has also been impaled by a metal spike. And that savage stroke of psychopathic fury tells Milo this case will call for more than standard police procedure. As he explains to Delaware, “Now we’re veering into your territory.”

It is dark territory, indeed. The dead woman remains unidentified and seemingly unknown to everyone. But her companion has a name: Gavin Quick—and his troubled past eventually landed him on a therapist’s couch. It’s there, on familiar turf, that Delaware hopes to find vital clues. And that means going head-to-head with Dr. Mary Lou Koppel, a popular celebrity psychologist who fiercely guards the privacy of her clients . . . dead or alive.

But when there’s another gruesomely familiar murder, Delaware surmises that his investigation has struck a nerve. As he trolls the twisted wreckage of Quick’s tormented last days, what he finds isn’t madness, but the cold-blooded method behind it. And as he follows a chain of greed, corruption, and betrayal snaking hideously through the profession he thought he knew, he’ll discover territory where even he never dreamed of treading.

As provocative as it is suspenseful, Therapy is premier Kellerman that finds the award-winning author firing on all creative cylinders—and carrying readers on an electrifying ride to a place only he can take them, for an experience they won’t soon forget.


From the Hardcover edition.

Reviews

Rating: 3 / 5
Date: 2010-01-31
Summary: "Maybe Kellerman should now create a new character"

Not the usual gripping Alex Delaware stuff!! Maybe Kellerman should now retire Delaware and think up a new character to write about?

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Rating: 5 / 5
Date: 2009-12-24
Summary: "Book"

Delivery was timely as promised. The item was the exact quality promised. I would not hesitate to purchase from this seller again.

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Rating: 3 / 5
Date: 2009-08-02
Summary: "Alex Delaware from the Cookie Cutter"

I guess Kellerman had some contractual obligations to fulfill when he churned this one out with a cookie cutter. It's just not up to his usual standards. The basic premise, rich clients, radio shrink, Medicare fraud could have added up to his best ever but after the initial ride up the roller coaster hill we found ourselves on the kiddy ride. It was difficult to connect with any of the characters and I kind of resented the brief cameo appearances of individuals from former books. Hopefully Kellerman will recover from his writers block or whatever caused this infirmity and our next visit with Alex Delaware will be up to par. bg

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Rating: 1 / 5
Date: 2008-03-16
Summary: "What an awful book"

I went in with low expectations. I figured it would just be a time-waster to read on an airplane. But this book was simply terrible. Terrible. My first problem was that it was dull. The second was that the plot was often unbelievable, with lucky accidents happening a bit too often. The third was that the characters were dreadful cliches. And I mean dreadful. The convicts were all bad stereotypes. The cops were all bad stereotypes. The activists at a book reading were all bad stereotypes. The "valley girl" character was a bad stereotype. It's as though he did his research by watching bad movies, instead of looking at real life, finding interesting character attributes, and making each character a real person. Terrible, and inexcusable. Actually, I think my guess at how he did his research is probably right on, because even worse than all of this, anytime he wrote about anything I know anything about at all, he got the facts wrong. Small examples: he talks of convicts in california pumping free weights in prison, but I used to work in a supermax, and California got rid of free weights in prisons. Also, he talks of some stabbings in prison that he says are typical of how murders are committed. I know from inmates that if they are trying to kill someone, they don't stab where or in the way he said they do. Likewise with so many other details. A really really really sloppy book.

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Rating: 4 / 5
Date: 2007-11-12
Summary: "A great psychological thriller that avoids psychological techno-speak!"

When a young couple parked for a little late night loving beside an empty house on Mulholland Drive are found murdered with what appears to be sexual overtones, LAPD Detective Milo Sturgis is stumped. While the woman eludes identification completely, Milo and his consulting psychologist sidekick, Alex Delaware, identify the male as Gavin Quick, a troubled young man undergoing psychotherapy as a result of behavioural changes attributed to a severe head injury he received in a car accident. The chance discovery that Quick's therapist, Mary Lou Koppel, had another patient who was murdered only a year earlier seemed like a coincidence until Koppel herself was found murdered with an MO that resembled the first double killing. The game is on as Sturgis and Delaware track the killer on a convoluted trail that crosses prison reform, group therapy, fraudulent billing and insurance scams, Rwandan genocide (yes, you read that one right) and mercenary killers for hire!

That may all seem a little far-fetched, to be sure, but the story rests on a firm foundation of clues and, as always, thought-provoking analysis and deductions that rely on Delaware's understanding of the human condition as a psychologist. But, unlike "Rage", a story which was a near incomprehensible thicket of psycho-babble, "Therapy" is a straightforward police procedural but set firmly and predictably in Kellerman's well-known psychology environment.

Much of the story is told in the form of a give-and-take brainstorming dialogue between Delaware and Sturgis in which they bounce their ideas about the case off one another. While this technique may prove wearisome and perhaps difficult to follow in a regular book format, Rubenstein's scintillating performance on the audio book presentation brought Kellerman's command of realistic dialogue to life and made this form of story-telling straightforward and marvelously entertaining!

There was also a moment toward the end of the novel that deserves special recognition. Of course, the Jane Doe from the opening chapters was ultimately identified. When her brother arrived to confirm the identification and claim the body, the conversation that he had with Delaware was so bleak, so poignant and so gut-wrenching, it almost broke my heart. Frankly, I've always thought of Kellerman as a thriller writer and I never thought that he had writing at that level in him.

Highly recommended.

Paul Weiss