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Devil’s Waltz
Jonathan Kellerman
Little, Brown hardback, 416 pages
Review by Gerald Houghton (1993)

Academic psychologist turned author, Jonathan Kellerman’s eighth novel is his shortest since the second (Blood Test) and best in several years. Never one to use a page where six will suffice, the previous Private Eyes found him foundering on the shores of the absurd, dragging out the limpest of plots at agonising length and leading to the most farcical climax imaginable, leaving no one impressed and most bored rigid. It seemed that his standard technique – consultant child psychologist Alex Delaware uncovering dark conspiracies lurking behind the cases he’s drawn into – had all but played itself out.

In Devil’s Waltz, Delaware is called in by a former colleague to advise on the baffling case of a twenty one month old girl who is continually being brought into LA’s Western Pediatrics Hospital with a variety of life-threatening illnesses, all without apparent cause. The doctor is quickly convinced he’s uncovered a textbook case of Münchausen syndrome by proxy, with the parents deliberately creating sickness in their child, a diagnosis seemingly emphasised by the cot death of their first baby. But since the parents are the wealthy Chip and Cindy Jones, son and daughter-in-law to Charles Jones Junior, Chairman of the hospital board, the waters are muddied. And with the help of his old friend and Kellerman regular, cop Milo Sturgis, Delaware begins to probe a web of corruption, intrigue and coercion that along the way drags in the apparently unconnected vicious mugging of a hospital doctor and the sadistic murder of a young woman across town.

Of course, this is little more than a flimsy house of cards. To stand outside a Kellerman plot is to see the wires that string the thing together, but to be drawn inside is to be at home with the pacing, the ragged characterisation, the authentic clinical definitions. Kellerman’s recent novels have strayed into the preposterous – the ludicrous neo-Nazis of Time Bomb, the numbing tedium of the super-rich in Private Eyes, the Howard Hughesisms of Silent Partner. However, Devil’s Waltz is a relatively tight, economic exercise in thriller writing. The majority of events unfold in the hospital or the Jones house, the violence off-stage, leaving this – in the light of those recent books – a surprisingly sedate work. Even a climactic unveiling in the dying moments is relatively relaxed.

No one can claim grand literary merit for Kellerman, but he has page-turning drive in spades, and for all it slides perhaps a little too easily into place at the end, Devil’s Waltz leaves the reader pondering whether the writer has finally listened to his critics. It’s a satisfyingly absorbing slab of work, aided by the comparatively low (for Kellerman) page count. Kellerman’s best novel remains 1987’s near classic Over the Edge, but while we wait for him to fashion something as viscerally thrilling, Devil's Waltz will keep things ticking over nicely.