Ann's Reviews > Crime Scene

I usually enjoy Jonathan Kellerman's books, but this one, written together with his son, is blah. To start with, I couldn't figure out what exactly Clay Edison's role in law enforcement is. He seems to be a sheriff's deputy who works in the morgue. So he's not a detective and he's not a medical examiner and it seems that as soon as he starts asking questions, he's trespassing on other people's turf. Second, he had a short brilliant career as a basketball player in college, but was definitely sidelined by a knee injury. But he seems to have never gotten over those days (even though he publicly denies it) and I find that a rather cheap way of setting up an inner conflict in the protagonist. Third, too much of the story doesn't make sense. When Dr. Rennert is found dead at the bottom of his staircase, the dead man's daughter insists that it was murder, something to do with a lawsuit from a decade earlier, when a subject in psychological research conducted by Dr. Rennert and his graduate student, Nicholas Lindhurst, was convicted of murdering a young woman. Clay gamely starts following up this thread, even after an autopsy shows conclusively that Dr. Rennert died of a dissecting aortic aneurysm. He keeps following up even after the daughter, with whom he's gotten hot and heavy for a night or so, ditches him without warning. And even after she changes her mind and gets angry with him for doing just what she had insisted he do in the first place. Clay is strangely passive through it all. The chronology also doesn't make a lot of sense, especially with regards to the question of when Dr. Rennert acquired a gun. Clay also inexplicably fails to follow up op a clue that is practically flashing a red neon sign saying "this is the link to the missing man" - a prescription for an antipsychotic written by a urologist !

Alex Delaware makes a short cameo into the book, just enough to remind me why I love the Alex Delaware novels and didn't care for this one : those books abound with memorable descriptions of Los Angeles and secondary characters that sound like people you'd want to meet (if only to marvel at how awful they are). And Milo Sturgis, Alex Delaware's detective friend, can always be counted on to deliver some cynical one-liners. I always feel compelled to keep on reading those books, whereas this one was more of a dutiful slog, hoping for a brilliant ending - that never happened.