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Bad Love
Jonathan Kellerman
Little, Brown hardback, 371 pages
Review by Gerald Houghton (1994)

‘Bad love. Bad love. Don’t give me the bad love . . .’ echoes the enigmatic message over and over, with its background of incessant, horrifying screaming. The tape is delivered in a plain brown wrapper to child psychologist Alex Delaware as the first in a sinister chain of events – chilling laughter over the phone, a late night trespasser, the killing of one of the doctor's prized Koi carp.

Readers are not going to be finding much they haven’t anticipated in this, the eighth Delaware novel. Early clues direct the doctor’s attentions towards the recent slaying of a young therapist – her killer’s shrieks appear on the tape – and two older unsolved murders, each with a so-called ‘bad love’ connection.

Through them, and helped as usual by his LAPD friend Milo, he traces the phrase back to a symposium mounted a decade earlier celebrating the work of his peer, the late Andres de Bosch, and a string of accidents and suicides that have done for those attending. This, and the unwelcome attentions of a bike gang – The Iron Priests – are not making Alex Delaware’s day.

There is never a great deal of subtlety in Kellerman’s fat thrillers – these are virtual one-a-year page-turning airport reads, albeit with an intelligence and humanity often lacking from the rash of Thomas Harris wannabes. Almost the Mr PC of suspense writers – Milo, for example, is overweight, well-adjusted and gay – much of the drive in here is provided by the good doctor’s nausea at uncovering the methods of the increasingly devalued de Bosch and his semi-sadist daughter, Katarina. The results, more so than ever, find Delaware occasionally a little too holier-than-thou (he was steamrollered into the symposium, but his own lack of self-discipline in the matter does elicit at least a modicum of sympathy for the villain of the piece.) And Kellerman’s evident concern at the plight of the homeless in Los Angeles, while it might be admirable, is heavy-handed and not a little patronising.

But as regular readers will attest, the benchmark of a Kellerman novel is how it stands alongside 1987’s cracking Over The Edge – and the answer is surprisingly well. His rough patch – the execrable Private Eyes and underweight Time Bomb – now seems well and truly a thing of the past, with the admirably tight Devil’s Waltz and now this. There is something of the procedural in places – the arrival of a dog in the doctor’s life is possibly a little too convenient given the action-packed finale; and the fact that a whole chapter at the end has to be given over to characters explaining the intricacies of the plot to one another does question the ease with which it all slots together – but this is still value-for-money thriller entertainment of a very high order. And that there are still novels out there steadfastly not trying to be the new Silence of the Lambs is something for which we should be grateful.