I NEITHER HIDE, NOR FEED, MY REVIEWS. THEY MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS.This is my second Kellerman novel. I' m really liking his work!I love the device of seeing criminal investigation through the eyes of a child psychologist, Alex Delaware. All the criminal forensics are there, but the crimes at times are secondary to Delaware's puzzling through the relationships and motivations from which the crimes arise.It's nice that Delaware is well-adjusted -- handsome and educated, but with a reasonable ego as he's aware of his frailties and limitations. In the sense that Alex has a lot of feminine "yang," his good friend, police detective Milo Sturgis provides some "yin." However, Alex is plenty yin, too, evidenced by his awesome, supportive girlfriend, Robin, who would never go for a jerk. Delaware is now in private practice, but does a certain amount of consulting with the justice system, evaluating child custody situations, etc., which is his nexus to crime.In this book, "bad love" has two meanings. At the first level, it refers to a certain celebrity child counselor's view that bad parenting is "bad love." Turns out the celebrity (deceased now for eight or so years) had a hidden meaning for the phrase, too. In the celebrity's private "corrective" residential school for disturbed children back in the '60s or '70s, he mistreated his charges, some of whom were not even disturbed per se, but dealing problems such as bed-wetting, dyslexia, absentee parents or domineering parents. The counselor gave secretive one-on-one sessions in which he emotionally abused the kids.To the public, this counselor, Dr. de Bosch (called "Dr. Botch" by one of his alumni) is a paragon of virtue, giving lectures and writing magazine columns on how to rear children, never disclosing his closeted abuse. To his alumni, he embodies evil. No wonder that when his "graduates" reach adulthood, some are very damaged -- one to the point that he undertakes to kill all the school's former faculty and key supporters. The sicko considers Delaware -- who never worked for de Bosch, and in fact thinks his theories are superficial and heavily borrowed -- to be part of the de Bosch travesty simply because Delaware, early in his career, was forced by a hospital supervisor to organize a psych conference that pretty much deified De Bosch.Th words "bad love" are also a clue that the perp leaves at some of the murder scenes. Alex is the one to figure out what the phrase refers to. He identifies the pattern in several seemingly unrelated deaths leading to the hurting, disgruntled former student of DeBosch's school of terror.Of course Alex does have an incentive to figure it all out -- he starts receiving cryptic threats (in writing and in the form of serious property damage), from which he concludes he's on the killer's hit list.There's a subordinate plot that offers relief from the grimness of the de Bosch saga -- Alex finds a stray French bulldog, to which he and Robin become attached as they searh for its owner. When the owner finally shows up (the middle-aged daughter of the actual owner, who recently died of natural causes), she sees the dog is well cared for, and invites Alex plus Robin to keep "Spike." (The daughter's hubby is allergic to dogs).They enthusiastically accept.Book is way more complex than I've described. Many wonderful, clever touches and insights. One quibble -- and I felt this, too, with this first Delaware book I read, "Survival of the Fittest" -- I don't get why Delaware sees patients at his home address. When a professional is dealing with people who are innately unbalanced, or unhinged by life events, why would he-she want clients or their relatives to know where he lives? It's a point, however, on which I'm willing to suspend my disbelief.
A quick caveat before my review: I didn’t realize this was part of a series until well after I started it so this review is purely for this book alone and not for the entire series.That having been said, what a fantastic introduction to the series! Every time I picked this book up I found myself having trouble putting it down and I don’t say that lightly. Starting with an unusual and alarming tape containing screams and what seems to be a child robotically chanting something about ‘bad love’, the story evolves at a steady clip as Alex Delaware, a child psychologist, and his cop-buddy, Milo, try to connect the dots to an ever more dangerous, disturbing, and escalating situation. That’s not to mention Robin, Alex’s girlfriend who’s out-of-town at the beginning of the story, and “Spike/Rover”, a stray French bulldog that Alex finds early in the story and who absolutely steals the show. Seriously, he became my favorite character. He’s adorable.Anyway, as I mentioned, the plot on this moves at a steady pace and never gets bogged down in technical psychology-jargon that would have been lost on me or by focusing too tightly on one thing or another. Rather, we’re given an everyday insight into Alex’s personal and professional life as well as some much needed levity in the form of one very affable little bulldog. That’s not to mention Milo, Robin, and Alex himself, all of whom are really enjoyable characters with dimension enough to make them all very real and tangible to me.Overall, even though this was part of a larger series I didn’t know about, I really enjoyed it and plan to seek out the rest of the series as soon as I can. Especially since this was a new author and relatively new genre to me. One can only hope the rest of the series turns out to be just as good.
Do You like book Bad Love (2003)?
If you love the earlier classic Alex Delaware novels, this one is another good mystery from Jonathan Kellerman. It started with a child's voice on a tape, mentioning about "bad love." That sends Alex on a journey all over California, searching for answers, while he works on another deposition for another case, when it gets heated up. We watch when Alex discovers the connection between the symposium and the murders that happened over the years. And then he realized his life is endangered as the last targets, when someone comes after him and Robin. We're on for a wild ride, when they connect the dots in a strange line of "suspicious deaths", which it wasn't as it appears. And it's even more stranger that it looks with a wicked twist at the end.
—Kristen
Did anyone else start to read this and think it was going to be Alex looking into the murder of the little girls' mother? Since that's how the book began, I assumed that the brown envelope that Alex received after his first meeting with them was going to related to that case! But perhaps it's setting something up for a future book....especially since it seems there was mental damage to both Tiffani and Chondra.For the main case in this book, it's about "bad love," a theory that was discussed years ago at a symposium that Alex helped host (under duress from his boss). The killer is now hunting down every doctor related to that conference and murdering them. I liked this book, it was overall a quick read (as many mysteries are for me) and although it's #8 in the series, I didn't feel like I was confused about who people were. I guess Alex and Robin are going to have to find a new place to live.I was also super surprised by the actual killers in the book! (view spoiler)[ I didn't guess about Andrew and only knew it was Jean Jeffers when Alex noticed her red nails... then of course she pulls off the mask and it's her, not Meredith Bork. (hide spoiler)]
—Jenny
My feelings are mixed about this one. I liked the introduction and characterization of the French bull dog, Spike. Kellerman is either a true dog person, or his research was thorough. Spike’s actions at the end were implausible, probably physically impossible, but the reader doesn’t mind. It would be nice if a dog of that size and build could have done what he did, so suspension of disbelief is set aside in favor of willing the dog success.I liked the descriptions of the tape. They lend tension and an overall eerie tone to the entire piece. Very frightening.I liked the occasional humor. In fact, I think that, of all the books in this series, this one has the most appealing dialogue between good friends Detective Sturgis and Dr. Delaware. When Sturgis is fingerprinting Delaware and asks him a question, Delaware responds with “I’m not saying a word without my lawyer, pig.” When Spike comes between Delaware and his on-and-off-again squeeze, Robin, Milo comments, “Oedipus Rover.”I didn’t like the uptight character given Dr. Delaware in this one. His sanctimony in previous books was a turn off but acceptable in a character brimming with confidence and chutzpah. Turning him into a whiny, jump-at-shadows wimp may have been an attempt to humanize the protagonist. If so, it backfired, merely making him contemptible and, on occasion, annoying.I didn’t like the use of two disparate storylines for the purpose of misdirects, shades of Blood Test. Parallel storylines work in Kellerman’s books only when the two plots are interrelated. When they don’t have anything to do with each other, the minor plot feels obstructionistic, more like one is being used to pad the work. It gets in the way of the real story and is wasted reading.More wasted reading was the detail invested on the homeless camp. This is my second time reading this book, and I skipped dozens of pages addressing the plight of the homeless in the Los Angeles area. I got the sense I had stepped out of a novel and into an advocate’s cause célèbre. Admittedly, homelessness is an issue worth tackling, but it didn’t advance the story, not one iota, and should have been filed for a future novel emphasizing homelessness.Kellerman had to work hard to weave all his loose threads together in this one, and I didn’t find the ending convincing. I think sometimes he falls in love with characterization and setting and, at the eleventh hour, has to force himself to consider plot. If I re-read this one again, it will be selectively, revisiting only the parts I liked.
—Gwen
