A Cold Heart (Alex Delaware)
by Jonathan Kellerman
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Book Summary Information
Author: Jonathan KellermanEdition: Mass Market Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2003-12-30
ISBN: 0345452569
Number of pages: 432
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Book Reviews of A Cold Heart (Alex Delaware)
Book Review: FREEZE AND READ THIS BOOK!
Summary: 5 Stars
This is an extraordinarily well written and well crafted mystery. Kellerman has once again outdone himself.A brilliant guitarist has been found stabbed to death in an alley. The only witness cannot provide an adequate description of the killer.
A young punk rock wannabe star is also murdered. Her connection to Dr. Delaware other than a heated verbal exchange is that his then live in love Robin built a guitar for her.
Several more people are murdered - a ballerina in Boston; a musician in Southern California; a homeless woman and possibly others. A young writer whose whereabouts cannot be accounted for seems a likely suspect; his e-magazine is rife with nihilism and 1980s style punk fueled venom some 20 years later. Delaware, his friend LAPD Homicide Detective Milo Sturgis and two Sturgis' colleagues, Petra Connor and Eric Stahl make for a very unlikely quartet indeed.
The quartet work in separately and in pairs (Delaware/Sturgis and Connor/Stahl) tracking down all possible leads. What if any connection could there possibly be to a homeless woman and a group of artists living in different parts of the United States? The e-magazine leads the sleuths to a small private university where its creator graduated; a trip to the university fails to uncover any possible leads or links.
Who killed these people and why? Once again, Jon Kellerman has presented a masterpiece of a mystery with plenty of plot twists to keep readers riveted. His use of names and descriptions is clever; for example, a minor character aptly named Christian BANGSley is described as "Beatle mopped." I loved that. I also liked Dr. Delaware's new girlfriend Allison. Robin more or less was relegated to a minor role and I didn't like it when she tried to seduce Dr. Delaware when he came to see how she was doing. I also found it interesting that Robin wound up with the French bulldog she and Alex Delaware had owned. I still don't care for Robin.
I loved Elizabeth Martin, the brilliant department chair at the mysterious Charter College. A committed academic, she is interesting and believable and I really found her to be a strong character who made a good story even better.
Summary of A Cold Heart (Alex Delaware)
Jonathan Kellerman is a master at creating psychologically nuanced novels of suspense?an author whose name is synonymous with unrelenting action, intriguing plot twists, and penetrating insight into the criminal mind. Now he ventures into bold, new territory with his biggest and best novel yet. A Cold Heart features Kellerman?s brilliant signature style?but in this tour-de-force he mines even deeper the emotional landscape of his characters: psychologist-sleuth Alex Delaware, LAPD homicide detective Milo Sturgis, Milo?s colleague Petra Connor, and Alex?s ex-lover, Robin Castagna?bringing them all vividly to life as never before.?I?ve got a weird one, so naturally I thought of you,? says Milo Sturgis, summoning his friend Alex to the trendy gallery where a promising young artist has been brutally garroted on the night of her first major showing. What makes it ?a weird one? is the lack of any obvious motive, and the luridly careful staging of the murder scene?which immediately suggests to Alex not an impulsive crime of passion . . . but the meticulous and taunting modus operandi of a serial killer.
Delaware?s suspicion is borne out when he compares notes with Milo?s associate, Petra Connor, and her new partner, a strange, taciturn detective with a past of his own named Eric Stahl. The Hollywood cops are investigating the vicious death of Baby Boy Lee, a noted blues guitarist, fatally stabbed after a late-night set at a local club. What links Baby Boy?s murder with that of painter Juliet Kipper is the shadowy presence of an abrasive fanzine writer. This alias-shrouded critic?s love-the-art/disdain-the-artist philosophy and his morbid fascination with the murders leads Alex and the detectives to suspect they?re facing a new breed of celebrity stalker: one with a fetish for snuffing out rising stars.
Tracking down the killer proves to be maddening, with the twisting trail leading from halfway houses to palatial mansions and from a college campus to the last place Alex ever expected: the doorstep of his ex-lover Robin Castagna, whose business association with two of the victims casts her as an unavoidable player in the unfolding case. As more and more killings are discovered, unraveling the maddening puzzle assumes a chilling new importance?stopping a vicious psychopath who?s made cold-blood murder his chosen art form.
In Cold Heart, the latest thriller from bestselling author Jonathan Kellerman, Dr. Alex Delaware picks up on clues missed even by his closest friend, LAPD detective Milo Sturgis. Leave it to this canny shrink to figure out that the only thing two otherwise unconnected murder victims have in common (they're both artists making comebacks after early career burnouts) may hold the key to their deaths. Even for Alex, this unlikely link is a stretch, especially since Baby Boy Lee was stabbed outside a nightclub and Julie Kipper was bludgeoned in the bathroom of an art gallery. But when a concert pianist dies on the eve of his greatest triumph, Alex is sure that the murders are not only the work of the same killer but also connected to the unsolved slayings of a Boston ballerina and an L.A. rock singer. By an even greater coincidence, two of the victims were tangentially involved with Alex's former lover, Robin Castagna, which provides the good doctor a few well placed paragraphs to ruminate on what went wrong in their romance as well as rescue her from the serial murderer who's targeted her as his next victim.
As usual, Kellerman manages to make even a far-fetched plot like this one ring true, but after 17 Alex Delaware mysteries, his series protagonist holds few surprises for the reader, who longs for something to shake Dr. D. out of his smooth complacency. Losing Robin didn't do it--maybe the new woman in Alex's life will. --Jane Adams
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