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MURDER BOOK, THE
by Jonathan Kellerman
Ballantine Books, October 2002
368 pages
$26.95
ISBN: 0345452534


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Alex Delaware and his lover Robin are having problems. Robin has left to go on tour with a group of musicians and Alex feels deserted. Psychologist though he may be, he does not handle this well at all. While he is feeling sorry for himself, he receives a three ring binder in the mail. It has a series of pictures of dead bodies. His detective friend, Milo, recognizes one picture immediately. It is from one of the first homicide cases he ever worked and part way through the case he had been transferred off it and the case was buried. Now Alex and Milo determine to reopen it unofficially and find out what happened.

I enjoyed this book but there were things about it that bothered me. It seemed to me that Alex and Milo took some huge leaps in logic to come up with answers, such as the question of who sent the book to Alex and why it might have been sent. Perhaps their background knowledge made these assumptions plausible, but for this reader it seemed as though they were plucked out of nowhere.

Kellerman switches points of view throughout the book. The book begins in first person as Alex tells his story, but then we have a third person point of view following Milo as he goes about his business. Every time the point of view shifted, it pulled me out of the story and it took a few minutes to get back into it.

Even so, I thought this was a better written, more complex, and more intriguing book than the last few in the series have been. I do not especially believe that this is a series that has outlived its enjoyment. But Kellerman needs to be more careful to take his reader with him on the adventure and not assume that the reader is going to buy into either coincidences or point-of-view changes.

Finally I am getting a bit tired of vigilante justice. It really is not all right to shoot the bad guys just because you have defined them as bad guys. We have a system based on laws that says judges and juries make those decisions. It may be harder to write a book in which a detective captures criminals with the proof that a jury can accept, but morally I find the alternative repugnant.

The characters are empathetic and I do care what happens to all of them, which helps in the enjoyment of the book. The story is set in Los Angeles and while I think others do a better job of developing and defining this strangest of American cities, still the sense of place is there. The book is readable, the story of Milo’s past is intriguing, and on the whole it is a decent book. It is not a great one.

Reviewed by Sally A. Fellows, November 2002

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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