Monster (Alex Delaware series, Book 13): An engrossing psychological thriller - Softcover

Kellerman, Jonathan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0755342879 ISBN 13: 9780755342877

Publisher: Headline, 2009

Synopsis

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About this title

Review:

Consulting psychologist Alex Delaware has a novel approach to crime-solving: he uses his training to unlock the secrets in the minds of the victims and jiggles the clues he finds there until the right scenario emerges. So when Alex's LAPD buddy Milo finds the hacked-up body of a woman psychologist named Claire Argent in an abandoned car trunk--the second such murder in eight months--Alex heads for her place of employment: the Starkweather State Hospital for the Criminally Insane.

One of Argent's patients at Starkweather is Ardis "Monster" Peake, imprisoned for the unbelievably brutal murders of his mother and the family she worked for, including a small child and a baby. There's at least one eerie similarity between the mutilation of their bodies and Argent's: in all the bodies, the eyes were taken or destroyed. But Peake, diagnosed as schizophrenic and psychotic, is a well-behaved vegetable due to a steady diet of Thorazine, and he hasn't left the hospital since his incarceration 15 years before. How is it, then, that Claire Argent's assistant, Heidi Ott, swears she heard Peake say, "Dr. A. Bad eyes in a box" soon after he hears only the bare fact of her death? And why does Alex find Peake so empathetic, in spite of his violent past and chillingly vacant mind? When other mutilated bodies turn up, Alex and Milo begin to suspect that the real monster is very much at large. Like Kellerman's 12 previous Alex Delaware mysteries, Monster builds to a big, teeth-clenching bang and ends with some very satisfying surprises. --Barrie Trinkle

From the Inside Flap:

Alex Delaware is back! With a riveting and devilishly ingenious story about an asylum inmate who seems able to predict grisly slayings in the outside world.

How can a nonfunctional psychotic locked up in a supposedly secure institution for homicidal madmen predict brutal murders in the outside world? This is the enigma that Dr. Alex Delaware and Detective Milo Sturgis must penetrate in order to stop these horrific killings. First, a marginal actor is found dead in a car trunk, sawn in half. Months later, a psychologist at Starkweather Hospital for the Criminally Insane is discovered murdered and mutilated in a tantalizingly similar way. Dr. Claire Argent has been working caringly with Ardis Peake, a mental patient locked up for decades after he annihilated his mother and the ranching family that rescued him from homelessness. When reports of Peake's incoherent ramblings begin to make frightening sense as predictions of yet more murders, Delaware and Sturgis are drawn into a web of family secrets, vengeance, and manipulation - inside Starkweather and on the streets of L.A., where death, drugs, and sex are marketed as commodities. The climactic discovery they make as they race to save new victims gives fresh and terrifying meaning to the concept of monstrosity.  

About this edition

• Publisher: Headline
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0755342879
• ISBN 13: 9780755342877
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 512