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At times some elements are poignant, particularly at the end. So we always have that distantiation that is typical of the specialists in psychology. He is a marginal person who can only live on the side of society. You also have the exploration of lawyers, with a do-gooder woman who is more or less taking care of some social cases she defended when she was young, then a law firm in the hands of a completely crooked and berserk lawyer who wants to recuperate the tremendous fortune of the rich family he is managing, and a few other lawyers who are less important, and then you have a microcosm of the American society in its most ugly segments and least savory attitudes and dealings. Kellerman makes a pretty good job of it and the slow rhythm represents the psychologist's vision and at the same time the real rhythm or flow of life which can accelerate at times but that is most of the time slow, like in slow motion, pulled back. Then some highly gifted people, a child and an adult, a boy and a woman, in music, those who do not study music but create music, even when five or six. On one side a top social family, very rich, but also with a history from little to big, with previous phases of social disparagement (first marriage marked with drug abuse or other psychological disorders) and a daughter from that first marriage that inherits the family history and develops her own handicaps.
They are in a way explored, but the woman has social problems too and she gets mixed up in some strange sexual activities that will lead her to her own end. Then we are in Los Angeles and the whole plot revolves around a protected marshy area in the city and the man who is taking care of that protected area. The plot of this thriller, the whole thriller actually is seen through the eyes of a psychologist or maybe psychiatrist, or any level in-between, who is associated to a team of criminal investigators. The psychology of these two people is explored and it shows how they can get involved in criminal activities in a way just when these activities are disguised as socially marginal, and in this case environmentally marginal. You add to that the exploration of the police force, with a seasoned inspector, a rookie detective and an ex-cop turned private eye, all of them seen through the eyes of the psychologists. Then you just have to add a "natural victim" who was the victim of bullying and social rejection as soon as grade school, thus turned into a "social reject", and you can build a particularly ugly plot. His salvation is an admirable moment though Kellerman does not go as far as making the salvaged "social reject" meet the retrieved young musician, though he had insisted a couple of times on the privileged communication they had before the drama. The most poignant part is of course the retrieval of the very young music-genius who was traumatized by the situation.
The thriller takes a situation that is complex in all possible ways and that mixes various approaches. The epiphany of the "social reject" who was used by the murderers as their cover-up scapegoat is refreshing. He is a political and social misfit in this society and he cannot imagine himself in the main stream of social life. He is in connection with a woman who used to be a university professor and finds herself in her older adulthood also marginalized and making do with it. Even the worst "social reject" can find an epiphany, even from the police itself, provided the right explanation is given to them, which is of course the difficult condition to fulfill and a condition that the socially rejected person cannot fulfill on his own since he has developed some kind of morbid self-vision if not self-hatred. Quite a page-turner because of that social content.Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris 1 Panthéon, Sorbonne, University Paris 8 Vincennes Saint Denis, University Paris 12 Val de Marne Créteil, CEGID
Alex Delaware returns in another Jonathan Kellerman detective novel. It's not Kellerman's worst book, it's not his best either. A militant environmentalist watches over the site, along with a kid doing community service, and the kid is tipped that there are bodies in the marsh via a phone message.
Earlier books in the series had Alex working, and sometimes receiving help from Milo Sturgis, a police detective who works on the West Side in LA. Moe is younger, and Aaron is older, having left the department and set out on his own as a private eye; the trick is that though they share a mother, their fathers were different, and so Aaron is black, Moe white. At this point in the series, the books are essentially police procedurals.
Later, the bodies of several women are discovered, all missing one hand, and all facing in the same direction.Milo enlists the help of a young detective who works out of the same station house as he, and so we're introduced to the Reed brothers. Now, Milo is the detective, of course, and every time he has a case that is a "mystery" he invites Alex along. As an aside, in a future book Alex tells you the chief of police tried to hire him full-time to run the department's psych unit, so perhaps that explains the access Alex has when he tails along after Milo.In the current book, Milo has been handed an absolute disaster: someone's discovered a group of dead bodies in a marsh to the west of the city, land that's been hopefully slated for development, and also for preservation as a wilderness preserve.
This makes for some interesting interplay between the two characters, and it also leads to True Detectives, which features the two of them as main characters.I liked this book, but not spectacularly. It'd be good on a beach somewhere, I would imagine.
Sadly, I was required to return the CDs because the wrong audio book CDs were enclosed in the correct cover. I have returned the book at my own expense and am awaiting the correct book.
A man attending an auction buys a beautiful box in which are human bones. When the skeleton's were identified as long missing female prostitutes, psychologist Alex Delaware should have pointed the two detectives in another direction, though he does investigate a couple of leads himself. They are determined to be female. Soon three more skeletons are found on Save the Marsh property. A mysterious caller to Save the Marsh tells the young "volunteer" doing community service at the marshlands that a body is on the premises and doesn't tell anyone right away. The side story of Reed and his bi-racial brother, Aaron Fox, as well as the identity of the prostitutes' killer kept me reading. And why would I care)., Moses Reed, and Delaware almost exclude everyone else. Immediately the investigation focuses upon the hapless, somewhat disabled caretaker of the Vander estate, and I mean focused to the point that Milo Sturgis (is he gay.
Even the dialogue was confusing. Kellerman devotes an entire chapter developing the buyer of the box only to have this character to make a cameo appearance later in the novel. After the brother of one teen's friend call the police to report said fact, a body of a young, gifted piano teacher to a wealthy child prodigy is found with her right hand cut off. No red herrings here, unfortunately for an avid mystery reader. Intriguing plot, but poor execution. The reader is bombarded with the teen volunteer's usage of the F word throughout the story and even devotes a whole chapter to it, wonderful.not. All of the characters sounded the same except Fox and Simone Vander. My introduction to Joseph Kellerman reminded me of James Patterson, good plots, bad dialogue, and the hard deadline forced poor execution of a very promising plot.
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