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Dr Timothy Dare, a forensic psychiatrist, is truly up against it. His marriage to the only woman he's ever loved has ended, he thinks a patient he's recently begun to see might be a serial killer, his mystery-writer mother is being sued for libel and he's facing a professional disciplinary committee on charges of having left a sensitive case file in a restaurant. Out of desperation, Timothy wisely seeks therapy for himself in order to deal with the cascading catastrophes that have invaded every aspect of his life. He presents himself to Dr Allison Epstein on referral from a mutual friend, and Deverell structures the book around their sessions. Each chapter is introduced by a brief synopsis of the visit from Allison's point of view and then countered with the rambling musings of her patient. Deverell is too good a writer to give us straight-up psychotherapy a la Jonathan Kellerman, though. These therapists cross every known psychoanalytic boundary and break nearly every rule in the therapist's handbook. The result is a hilarious, madcap critique of talk therapy that celebrates the culture of self-obsessed narcissism. But therapy is just one strand in this carefully crafted plot, and I don't want to sell the rest of the story short. There's enough suspense here to keep even the most thriller-addicted reader interested. A serial killer is preying on the Vancouver gay community and Dare is the chief psychological consultant on the case. The themes of homophobia and internalized homophobia that form the core of the mystery are not portrayed as anything other than serious fuel for horrible hate crimes. Deverell does a decent job of fleshing out the genuine fear these murders leave in their wake, and the climax to the somewhat addled manhunt is chilling, heroic, bloody and hard-core. This bicycle riding, elevator-phobic shrink should be one of the least likely people to command sympathetic attention from anyone, much less a savvy mystery reader. Yet Deverell manages to pepper the narrative with just the right amount of intelligence and vulnerability to keep Dare well away from the slapstick and the reader firmly anchored in the plot. Andy Grove, the founder of Intel, once said that "only the paranoid survive." This book might well have taken Grove's quote as its epigraph. In MIND GAMES, bumbling paranoia serves Dr Timothy Dare very well indeed. The recent winner of the Ellis Award for Best Novel, Deverell is one of Canada's best crime writers. He richly deserves a larger audience in the US. Pick up a copy of MIND GAMES, or any of his other excellent novels, and see what I mean.
Reviewed by Carroll Johnson, June 2006
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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