Rating: 
Summary: I Miss Spike!!!
Review: I always enjoy reading an Alex Delaware book but the author made a huge mistake breaking Alex and Robin up (I thought that even with all their trials and tribulations they were much better together than this new relationship) If he had to get rid of Robin, at least let Alex have partial custody of Spike!!! He was one of the main reasons I was so fond of these books. His descriptions of his comical French bulldog face and personality were wonderful. I loved Spike and Milo's love/hate relationship.
Aside from that, I liked the book - good story line that held my interest right til the end.
Rating: 
Summary: In a series, comparisons are misleading
Review: This is an excellent Alex Delaware novel. It has pathos, the breakup of the lovely, artistic Robin and Dr. D; it has confusuion in new loves, for both, it has great dialogue between the angry Petra and the new Eric; it has just the hint of things to come without readers being able to say "I knew it!"; and of course it has 'murder most foul' and not one and not two and not three but four reasonable perps. When we have a series that has withstood the test of time, Crais' Elvis and Joe, Parker's Spenser and Hawk come to mind, there's bound to be an occasional letdown. Some authors like Lehane merely stop, saying, inter alia, "I don't want to do these folks anymore." (I kind of miss Patrick and Angie.) But we as readers can't have it both ways. The alternative to us knowing every nuance of the protagonist(s) (this is #17 for Alex and Milo) is cessation. I don't want that; I'll take the once-in-awhile predictable storyline. This isn't it. Someone is killing the artists, blues musicians, dancers, potters, painters, and the only clue in a limited field is that the victims appear to have won it all, lost it all, and are making a comeback. Great dialogue, nice characters, good dose of unpredictability. Highly recommended. Five stars. Larry Scantlebury
Rating:
Summary: It's an okay read for the series.
Review: I've been following the Delaware series for a while now, and while I don't think A Cold Heart measures up to The Murder Book, I think it was an okay read. Kellerman incorporates other characters into the series, such as Petra Connor. This has been a long time coming. As much as I enjoy reading about Milo, as he is a favorite of mine, I liked switching it up a little. I also liked how he kept Rick Silverman around with some dialogue too. After The Murder Book, I'd hate to see him fade into the background as he has for so many novels previous.
I also like the fact that Robin's out. Hopefully for good. Allison just seems like a better fit, somehow.
One thing I have noticed, as it seems the rest of you have as well, that Kellerman is repetative in his character descriptions. But I think he's trying to stop. Notice that Milo didn't "Run his hand over his face as though washing without water"? He did rub his face once in A Cold Heart, but the 'washing without water' bit wasn't there. The fact I even noticed tells me Kellerman's used the sentence much too often, but I've noticed it's been gone in the later novels.
I still remain a fan, and A Cold Heart isn't a horrible book. In fact, I found my attention easily kept throughout the whole novel. If you're a fan of the series, read it. My favorite still remains the Murder Book, but A Cold Heart is pretty enjoyable.
Rating:
Summary: Very average (tired?) 17th entry in Alex Delaware series
Review: We read every Kellerman (even his wife Faye!) novel that comes out, but didn't notice at first that this was another police-helper, psychologist Alex Delaware story. Indeed, detective Petra Conner returns (from "Billy Straight") with a new and quite mysterious partner, and we presumed the unfolding murder plot would be a second entry in that series. Lo and behold, a couple of chapters later, Milo Sturgish (Delaware's buddy) catches a murder weird enough he calls in Alex to help. Alex soon develops the theory that the killing was related to Petra's homicide, along with a few other unsolved cold cases from across the country, and so we're off and running with his 17th outing. The (weak) similarity that the victims were aspiring artists (from various fields of endeavor) on the brink of success added little or no compelling interest or suspense to the goings-on. It seems Kellerman has had difficulty in his last three or four efforts generating the kind of zest present in his earlier works that featured crimes involving children, Alex's true specialty as a professional (as is author Dr. Kellerman in real life). His mooning over lost love Robin is way beyond old, and a new love interest in this one does little to defray that nonsense. The strange actions of Petra's new partner provided almost more mystery than the mystery did -- and we really didn't understand why Milo, a competent cop, was posed as so goofy in this one. Lastly, by the time the pros decided whodunit, we readers had all figured it out. We've heard Kellerman's next outing will feature an entirely new character; that's good news in our judgment. Fine writing skills, never a problem here, are just not enough to carry off more Delaware machinations. We suggest he go back to his original practice and let us all get on with life.
Rating: 
Summary: I'm so glad to see someone else not so thrilled with kellerm
Review: I am sooo sick of Jonathan Kellerman and Alex Delaware. YES, he always describes Robin's hair as looking like grapes and YES he always goes on about how good looking and rich Alex is. I think both the author and the character are elitist and racist. And boring. And the plots are getting more and more preposterous.
Rating:
Summary: A Cold Read -- Zero Stars!!
Review: I've been a long time fan of Kellerman although his last few books have been lagging; this one is clearly the worst. There were great opportunities to spice things up with the addition of Petra and the mix of first-person and third-person narrative, but it fell flat. The addition of Eric Stahl too is troublesome -- he's clearly a poor man's Joe Pike from the Elvis Cole series by Robert Crais. The plot is preposterous and the connections made by Delaware are ridiculous...we're supposed to believe that RC written in some guy's calendar refers to Robin, the ex? Quite a leap. I've always been a little stupefied that Milo has to rely on Delaware to solve all his cases for him and this book is no exception. When Milo asks Delaware which flights he should check out and how to go about it, I threw in the towel on the series. Milo must be the most inept cop in all of California, which is probably supposed to be a nice balance with the most sexy, most attractive, most libidinous psychologist pal of his -- Dr. Delaware. After awhile, I started skimming over the mentions of Delaware's good looks, money, and instant erections. Kellerman mailed this one in and it shows, complete with typos throughout. Petra states in one of the chapters, "This is getting seriously weird..." Well this book is seriously awful. It was terrible. Don't waste your time.
Rating:
Summary: Robin's hair looks like grapes
Review: In every Alex Delaware novel I go in waiting for the observation, usually made by Alex, that Robin's long curly auburn hair looks like grapes. Grapes tumbling down her white teensy shoulders, grapes falling across her pillow, grapes poofing out from beneath the elastic of her safety glasses, etc. This time, however, it was Petra who noted to herself that Robin's hair looked like grapes cascading over the straps of her darling little overalls. So yeah, I guess Kellerman is really expanding his characters. har.
Rating: 
Summary: Breathing some new life into an old series.
Review: I've been increasingly disenchanted with the Alex Delaware novels. The plots felt like they were really reaching to keep up the interest of the writer and reader and mostly they felt as though we were walking over the same old tired ground. _A Cold Heart_ won't take any prizes for being the best Delaware novel, or even one of the best, but I was heartened to see Delaware try another direction for the character and a new emotional thread with which to tie everything together. I found myself genuinely interested in his struggle to let go of Robin, and I liked the way Kellerman portrays people trying to discover new love while burdened with so much baggage. Unfortunately, the plot is not up to the new direction. The killings are far-fetched and the villain was very easy to guess. Also, the way Delaware's love life is written into the plot is very hard to believe and ultimately unnecessary. Kellerman should choose an absolutely pedestrian murder for the next novel-- go back to basics and not try to connect it to anything spectacular. Then perhaps he can really refind his groove and do what he used to do so well. Book in and of itself is really three stars or less, but I gave it four since it shows the first signs of life in a long time.
Rating:
Summary: Moving Up
Review: As a Kellerman fan, I would recommend this book - it has neat plot twists (killing artists who are "on their way up"), believable suspects who turn out to be strange but innocent, quirky characters (both major and minor), and a real feel for the L.A. atmosphere. My only three complaints are these - the Arab-bashing was racist and completely out of line and unconnected with the story, Robin is gone but replaced by an equally boring new girlfriend (Kellerman is so good at creating interesting characters - why can't Alex have a girlfriend with a personality) and I was disappointed at the revelation regarding Eric at the end. I was hoping he was just a man with a quirky personalty, who would make a fun "foil" for Petra in future books. Instead, he'll probably just deal with his problems and turn normal (yawn). But I would recommend this book.
Rating:
Summary: gratuitously racist
Review: I have read all the Kellerman books. The early ones, though they would be very dated now should you read them, were the best. I keep hoping for a return to form, but all we get book after book is boring formulaic writing.
The pathetic thing, not observed in any of the 29 reviews I read here, is that Kellerman has now decided to inject some splenetic racism into his work.
For no reason, except as supposed background to the new character introduced, Kellerman obliquely plays up to the Zionist lobby with anti-Arab slander. This is trivial in some instances, such as describing the murderer as having a beard like Yassar Arafat. But it also portrays Saudis, with the collusion of the American government, as white slave traders capturing innocent blonde American girls. The cousin of a member of the Saudi royal family also is characterised as murdering an innocent American family by driving into them at a shopping mall.
This 'product placement' for the Zionist lobby has nothing to do with the book, and imagine the outcry if an author had similarly so gratuitously slandered Jews or Afro-Americans.
Otherwise, the prose in this book conforms to Kellerman's write-by-numbers style of recent years.
At times, one wonders if he is not a master of irony. That is, is he just writing so poorly and making his characters so lame as a very very subtle form of characterisation. Does he for example have Allison order an Irish coffee as an aperitif in order to signal to the reader that she is socially inadequate?
Alas, it is impossible to believe in this level of art coming from the hack typing, not writing, Kellerman evinces overall.
The funniest thing in the book is how Kellerman seems so unaware of how the literary criticisms he applies to the murderer really function as damning indictments of his own authorial inadequacy.
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