Therapy

Rating:
Summary: Once started it can't be put down!
Review: A young man and woman are found dead, both shot at close range in the head, the woman, in addition to being shot, is impaled by a metal spike. Homicide detective Milo Sturgis responds the call and brings his good friend, psychologist, Alex Delaware with him.

The crime scene holds no information about the young woman, but the man is found to be Gavin Quick, a troubled soul whose past landed him on a therapist's couch. Alex begins looking into Gavin's background to find a man who, once he suffered a major head-injury, had wild mood swings and began obsessing about certain woman.

As a result of an incident with a woman he admired, Gavin was forced to see Dr. Mary Lou Koppel, a popular psychologist who guards the privacy of her patient...alive or dead. Alex desperately needs the help of Dr. Koppel, but her resistance to divulge information leaves him cold, until a shocking discovery has him questioning her about the death of another patient of hers years before.

Alex and Milo start digging through Gavin's past only to find more questions that need answering, until another woman is found impaled and the investigation takes a surprising turn.

'Therapy' is the best Alex Delaware book is years. Once begun the book can't be put down. Expert pacing and a masterful plot will keep you racing through the pages to find out who did it and why. Jonathan Kellerman has made the psychological thriller genre his own and 'Therapy', his most powerful and suspenseful novel, shows him at the top of his game.

Set aside some time because you'll be up all night reading to discover who did it and why!

Nick Gonnella

Rating:
Summary: Solid mystery
Review: Alex Delaware and Milo Sturgis investigate the murder of a young couple, which soon engulfs them in an increasingly complex mystery.

Jonathan Kellerman is great at creating complicated, well-developed plots and shows no signs here of losing his touch. I also quite liked the supporting characters, especially the Quick family.

My only real problem with Kellerman is his over-reliance on description. I don't really need to know what the bookshelves of some minor character looks like. His descriptions can sometimes run as long as an entire page, and I just wind up skimming.

Otherwise, another highly satisfying book from one of crime's best writers.

Rating:
Summary: Kellerman's Latest Alex Delaware Thriller Same Old, Same Old
Review: Alex Delaware should sell stock in Google.

It seems like in the last few book, most of his investigative break through have come from running some poor schmuck's name through the Internet search engine to find out about the most intimate details of a person life. In one funny turn of events he actually says he needs to do some old fashion leg work, so what does he do. He turns to an old friend who is an expert at discovering government funding. How does she do it? By searching computer databases.

Therapy is the latest yarn by Jonathan Kellerman. Once again he returns to his safe ground. A first person dominated tale from the perspective of Dr. Alex Delaware, a California Psychologist. This time, Dr. Delaware is helping his friend, Lieutenant Milo Sturgis, investigate the brutal slaying of two young lovers found parked in a convertible. One of these young lovers was the recent victim of a traumatic brain injury and was seeing a celebrity shrink.

As the investigation moves on, it is discovered that this isn't the first patient of this celebrity shrink to be murdered using this M.O. Eventually, the psychologist herself is murdered. What follows is a complex tale involving strippers, the Rwandan Tutsi genocide, Medicare fraud, prison reform, secret government officials and real estate deals. The Plot becomes so complex that it guarantees a bit of an anti-climatic ending.

For the most part, the book is fast paced and fun to read. Unfortunately, Kellerman's choice to write solely in the first person again prevents a lot of character development. His previous Delaware novel included third person accounts from Sturgis and his female LA Detective Petra, and these changes of pace in the story telling really rounded out the story. Here we are back to the ho-hum goody two shoes word of Alex Delaware.

Kellerman is a gifted story teller, but boxes himself in too much in this tale. In a plot as intricate as this, with a lot of dirty players in dirty places, confining us to Dr. Delaware's nice house doing computer searches takes some away from the story.

Rating:
Summary: where is robin
Review: all i can say to kellerman is bring back robin and get rid of allison.

Rating:
Summary: A riveting plot and adventure
Review: Another Alex Delaware novel comes to life under Kellerman's skilled hand, churning out a riveting plot and adventure based on a young couple's murder in the Los Angeles hills. The savage murder and missing identity of the young woman involved lands the case in Alex Delaware's lap, involving him in a series of clues which brings him in conflict with a popular celebrity psychologist's Therapy cases.

Rating:
Summary: Oh Jonathan what did you do?
Review: As a regular fan and reader of all things Kellerman (including Faye) I rushed right out and purchased Therapy. Right from the begining things didn't feel right. In this book Milo and Alex spend all their time driving around LA, narrating the streets they are on, taking the reader down different who-done-its senarios, without ever really connecting the dots. Also Robin makes a cameo, but you ask yourself why, because it added NOTHING to the story. Allison's presence in the book is also unremarkable, and at the end it made me curious if she was just in the book to meet Mr. Kellerman's page requirement. Finally, the mystery characters were so disjointed that I became frustrated trying to remember why they were involved in the plot. I finished this book last night and I thought thank goodness that is over. It really was a terrible book and I gave it two stars because I'm still a Kellerman fan. Let's just hope he hasn't lost his touch.

Rating:
Summary: Where's the old Jonathan Kellerman?
Review: Boring, boring, boring. That just about sums up this book. Sorry Mr. Kellerman -- you need you get your old spark back. You used to be so readable, but your recent books are sluggish at best.

Rating:
Summary: (4 1/2) Multiple Murders for Alex and Milo to Untangle
Review: Clinical psychologist and LAPD consultant Alex Delaware and his friend Detective Milo Sturgis are having dinner at a restaurant in Beverly Glen when by happenstance the wail of police sirens alerts them to a nearby double homicide. When they arrive at the scene, the victims are a suggestively undressed young man and woman sitting in a red Mustang convertible parked in a secluded driveway; they have both been shot in the head at close range and in addition the woman has been impaled on an iron stake. The male victim's driver's license identifies him as Gavin Quick, but there is no identification for his blond companion. When Alex and Milo arrive at Gavin's home to notify his family of his murder, his mother Sheila is home alone; his father Jerry is a scrap metals dealer who is on a business trip and his older sister Kelly is a first year law student at Boston University. After Sheila overcomes her shock and grief, she manages to briefly summarize for them the recent events in Gavin's life, which revolve around the brain injuries which he received as a passenger in a car during an accident in which two of his friends were killed. The resultant personality changes and mental impairment had led Gavin to drop out of college and receive both occupational and psychological counseling. Sheila incorrectly assumes that the blond with Gavin was Kayla Bartell, a former girlfriend from an upscale Beverly Hills neighborhood whose misidentification provides some difficult moments for Alex and Milo.

In some respects, this is a straightforward police procedural, but there are so many interwoven threads and layers that gradually reveal themselves that pursuing the case is more like assembling a complex jigsaw puzzle without a picture to guide them than simply peeling back the proverbial layers of an onion. Their inability to establish the identity of the second victim until very late in the investigation is not only troubling, but leaves the motivation behind the murders more problematical. Furthermore, Alex is troubled when he discovers that Gavin's therapist was Mary Lou Koppel, a media savvy psychologist well known through her talk radio program and someone with whom he had a previous disturbing professional experience. His and Milo's antennae figuatively quiver when they discover that Flora Newsome, another patient of Mary Lou's, had been violently murdered approximately one year ago in a crime with some superficial similarities to the recent homicides. They are further intrigued by the inconsistencies which gradually develop in the stories of the various individuals involved. Jerry, Gavin's father; Eileen Paxton, Sheila's sister and Gavin's aunt; Mary Lou; her associate and Gavin's original therapist, Franco Gull; Gavin's neurologist Dr. Singh and Ray Nichols, Flora's ex, not only seem to have quite divergent views of the events preceding the deaths of Gavin and Flora but also appear to be less than wholly truthful.

As you might imagine, when Mary Lou Koppel is found murdered in her own home, the third female victim to be both shot and brutally stabbed, Alex and MIlo decide to concentrate on the connections between the victims. One such interesting character is Sonny Koppel, Mary Lou's former husband and office landlord, who has made a fortune in the real estate business but keeps such a low profile and has such total disregard for material possessions (or "stuff" as he labels it), that he lives unrecognized in one of his own low rent apartment buildings. (Is it simply coincidence that he is also Jerry Quick's office landlord as well?)

In the context of the investigation there are opportunities to enlighten the reader of the series regarding the progress of Alex's recent relationship with Allison Gwynn. And the French bulldog Spike briefly reappears when Alex is pressed into service as an emergency dogsitter for his ex, Robin. Some fascinating insights about Milo's very private relationship with his personal partner Rick are also cleverly introduced . As the story meanders, it is frequently not clear what areas of the investigation will be productive and which might be the author's intentional deadends of misdirection. But there is a lot of interesting detail about areas as diverse as the psychological treatment of patients with head injuries (Gavin felt like an android whose "wiring had been changed"), the Holocaust, patient billing scams based on government reimbursement criteria, and even the genocide which occurred in Rwanda. There is humor and philosophy galore, and some great phraseology. My favorite was the term "misery pimp" to describe the seemingly caring professional liberals who manage to profit from the misfortunes of others, often with the help of such supposedly high minded organizations as the U.N.

Since I am not a regular reader of the Alex Delaware series, I cannot compare this to the author's other work. However, I highly recommend this book as a standalone police procedural/psychological detective story with many complexities that are are cleverly woven into a very involved but nevertheless highly satisfactory conclusion. If you want a detective series with psychological overtones but which features more straightforward stories which are faster reads, then I suggest that you instead turn to the series featuring profiler Alex Cross by James Patterson. Speed readers should look elsewhere; the enjoyment of this book comes from the details of the complex plot and character development, the use of language, and the author's professional knowledge of psychology and his insights and commentary regarding human nature.

Tucker Andersen

Rating:
Summary: Great reading!!
Review: Detective Sturgis and LAPD psychology consultant Alex Delaware and his friend are curiously pulled into a double homicide. I like the straight forward no-nonsense police procedural style, but I also liked the twists and turns in the plot. I think I would have liked more clues, but the antagonist identity is delayed a little too long. This is minor as the plot and character development are top notch. At times funny, at times philosophical, at times sad, always thought provoking and always interesting. I consider this a really good read. As good as James Patterson's works.

If you like a good conspiracy... then check out these books also: I just read a copy of Edgar Fouche's 'Alien Rapture,' which astounded me. Fouche was a Top Secret Black Program 'insider', whose credibility has been verified over and over. Want to be shocked, check out Dr. Paul Hill's 'Unconventional Flying Objects' which NASA tried to ban, and always read the Amazon reviews.

Rating:
Summary: Huh?
Review: I agree with another viewer - this book is too confusing to be enjoyable. There were too many characters, too many possibilites, too many twists, turns, dead ends and too many crimes done by too many people. I finished it with a sigh of relief.