audiobooks

Eldon Mate, the Dr. Death who sends weary travelers on their way out of life with the help of a few injections, is found trussed up and dead in the back of his own euthanasia van. It's up to psychologist Alex Delaware and his buddy, LAPD gay cop Milo, to find out who took it upon themselves to put Dr. Death out of his pain.

While I try to be a moderately enthusiastic fan of the Alex Delaware series, DR. DEATH did nothing to encourage me. The prose was dry, the plot lagging, the characters forced. Kellerman seemed to feel the need to have Alex come up with a million possible scenerios for who could have done the killing, then go about disproving them all. Alex and Milo end up working at cross purposes part of the time (frankly, any time Milo is pulled from this series it suffers greatly), and Robin (Alex's longtime girlfriend) failed to make up for the lack. Yes, there is an interesting subplot that serves to nicely complicate things and I did enjoy the parts where Alex conducts actual sessions with patients (although I can't quite figure out what he accomplishes), but there are far too many detailed descriptions of Los Angeles locale and far too many of Alex's diced thoughts for me to truly enjoy this book. Which brings me to my last point: I've read this book twice, once in book form, once on tape. Normally I enjoy stories much more on tape, but in this case John Rubinstein's narration only serves to make the plot even slower and Alex's thought processes even more annoying.

I can understand the difficulty of maintaining a series like this -- fans want a certain thing, but if you give it to them over and over they complain of boredom. Still, I can't help hoping that the sort of boredom inspired by DR. DEATH is not so much a result of continuing a series as of failing to live up to it. All of us fans will inevitably read this book -- we're fans, after all. But I'd rather reread OVER THE EDGE any day.

I really enjoyed this psychological thriller primarily because of the skill Kellerman uses to develop the plot and to describe the characters and their motivations, beliefs, behaviors... their personalities. He provides the best of both worlds. He presents a crime and works toward its solution by using Milo Sturgis and standard police techniques. He also creates characters, both victims and suspects, and allows the reader to see them through the unique psychological perspective of Alex Delaware. We are privy to Delaware's impressions about the psychological dynamics of the characters: of Dr. Eldon Mate, the man who killed dying patients and is now a murder victim; and several suspects, especially Eric and Stacy Doss, tormented children of a woman who appears to have been one of Dr. Death's victims.

The reader is able to sit in on psychotherapy sessions and listen to Delaware as he helps clients face their fears as he explores their pathology. We also follow him as he reviews the files of a serial killer and develops his own ideas of who killed Dr. Death and why.

Jonathan Kellerman expertly educates and entertains the reader in the worlds of crime and psychology. He has advanced the police procedural by adding the interesting but often misunderstood applied field of psychology,i.e. psychotherapy. Dr. Death may not be his best but it still very good and definitely worth reading.

Dr. Eldon Mate is the angel of mercy in Los Angeles, or was, because he's found dead in the back of the van, where he had assisted in the suicides of so many, hooked up to his own "Humanitron machine." And just so the police don't think he took his own life, the killer mutilated the body.

Once again Detective Milo Sturges enlists the aid of his old friend Dr. Alex Delaware to consult on a murder case and once again the pair become embroiled in a search for a killer. First off, they ask themselves, who might have had it in for the death doc? Perhaps family members of those he'd assisted into the great beyond. Perhaps the son he'd abandoned as a small child.

And to make matters more interesting, Alex is counseling Stacy and Eric Doss, the children of Joanne Doss, one of the death doctor's assisted suicides. Alex is a child psychologist, after all. Will this potential conflict of interest come between Alex and Milo? And did Doctor Death really do in Joanne, or had she been done by her hubby in a copycat killing?

As usual Kellerman had me glued to his words as I eagerly read on, dying to see what the next page had in store for me in this intriguing book that kept the suspense high right up until the surprise twist at the end.