About the Only Reason to Read this Kellerman Work is an Obsession with Alex Delaware
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Author: Jonathan Kellerman Title: Obsession Genre: mystery
On the way home from work yesterday I was musing about the concept of cruise control: essentially, it's "monotony in motion." Sure, a steady, predictable course is generally a good thing when you're behind the wheel, but the same does not hold true for when one's writing a book. And, in this reader's humble opinion, Obsession - the latest offering from mega-bestselling author Jonathan Kellerman - pretty much looks as though it was written on autopilot. Not only is the course of the narrative steady and predictable (you may read that as "monotonous" if you wish), but the course of the plot is as predictable as a semi sailing down an interstate highway. In comparison to the Kellerman novels of old - and even some of the Kellerman novels of recent years - it simply lacks the elements necessary for a good suspense novel...
When a former patient afflicted by OCD reappeared on Alex Delaware's office doorstep, it looked to be a simple case of hand-holding for a grief-stricken young woman whose mother had died suddenly. But it wasn't her condition, it was her mother's dying declaration - mumbled words about "killing someone close" - that truly piqued the urbane psychologist's interests. And, as he is ever wont to do, he took his suspicions to buddy Milo Sturgis, LA's most famous gay homicide detective. A bit of backtracking on mother and daughter's housing history didn't turn up any nearby unsolved murders, but Delaware and Sturgis are nothing if not creative. Their creativity, though, came at a price this time: someone they'd contacted in the course of their "research" - it wasn't a "case," since Milo was on vacation - reacted badly, and the result was murder. And it was only one of a string of murders, reaching both backward and forward in time.
Even with a total absence of clues, Delaware and Sturgis built themselves an airtight case against a man - Blaise de Paine - that they'd never even seen, a man about whom they knew virtually nothing: no address, no phone number, no history, no nothing - based entirely on loads of supposition tempered by Delaware's superior intellect. Leaps that lacked foundation even in intuition took them across vast gulfs in evidence, often relying on the lifting power of the Coincidence Fairy's wings to complete the jump. With the murdering slimebag identified in the first reel, all that was left to pump up the suspense for the remaining 250 pages was to continue the pretense that Delaware's original patient was in danger from a guy who had no reason to know she existed. Talk about your monotony...
Sturgis, SD [Bradley Gordon / wikimedia]
Heavens to Betsy: is Obsession really number twenty-one in the Alex Delaware series? Congratulations: you're old enough to drink... Twenty-one, eh? Small wonder Kellerman seems to have written this one on autopilot. Oh, the aspects typical of a Kellerman plot are all there - persistent name-dropping about lovely luthier Robin's client base; Delaware's ongoing fascination with fashion and fabric, which in Obsession spills over from Kellerman's florid descriptions of every character's sartorial elegance (or in Milo's case, inelegance) to details of the interior of every house he visits. Characters, too, are pretty much one-dimensional stereotypes: the concerned nurse, the self-indulgent junkie, the controlling movie director, the childlike giants (two, count 'em, two). But that's all background noise: the real dissonance comes in the core of the plot. To put it bluntly, Obsession is boring.
Obsession is boring because it's a mystery that's constructed of smoke and mirrors, in which critical questions are not asked up front. Instead, the intrepid investigators embark on a wild goose chase that could well be based on faulty assumptions from the first step: was there even a murder in the first place? If so, where did it happen? When did it happen? Who died? Why? The way tangentially-involved people start dropping like flies as Delaware and Sturgis continue their little exploration also makes no sense, so Kellerman must always excuse it as "the unpredictability of a psychotic mind." Feh.
The manner in which Delaware and Sturgis build their entire "case" without a shred of hard evidence, based mainly on post hoc, ergo propter hoc logic, is almost insulting in its silliness. That's not to mention that every single piece of the puzzle seems to have been dropped on their plates by that winged sprite, the Coincidence Fairy. And that the big lead comes as gossip from Robin's client base is, to put it mildly, simply stupid.
As fan bases go, the Kellerman family - Jonathan, wife Faye, and offspring Jesse - has built a large and loyal group of readers. So this book, like all the rest of the Delaware series, will likely hover near the top of the best-seller lists for a week or two. However unlike many of his earlier novels, something as dull as Obsession is unlikely to generate much new business for the franchise.
note to JK: Sturgis, South Dakota, is in the Black Hills, not the Black Mountains.