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Summary
Summary
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * A former star athlete turned deputy coroner is drawn into a brutal, complicated murder in this psychological thriller from a father-son writing team that delivers "brilliant, page-turning fiction" (Stephen King).
Natural causes or foul play? That's the question Clay Edison must answer each time he examines a body. Figuring out motives and chasing down suspects aren't part of his beat--not until a seemingly open-and-shut case proves to be more than meets his highly trained eye.
Eccentric, reclusive Walter Rennert lies cold at the bottom of his stairs. At first glance the scene looks straightforward: a once-respected psychology professor, done in by booze and a bad heart. But his daughter Tatiana insists that her father has been murdered, and she persuades Clay to take a closer look at the grim facts of Rennert's life.
What emerges is a history of scandal and violence, and an experiment gone horribly wrong that ended in the brutal murder of a coed. Walter Rennert, it appears, was a broken man--and maybe a marked one. And when Clay learns that a colleague of Rennert's died in a nearly identical manner, he begins to question everything in the official record.
All the while, his relationship with Tatiana is evolving into something forbidden. The closer they grow, the more determined he becomes to catch her father's killer--even if he has to overstep his bounds to do it.
The twisting trail Clay follows will lead him into the darkest corners of the human soul. It's his job to listen to the tales the dead tell. But this time, he's part of a story that makes his blood run cold.
Praise for Crime Scene
"You could drive yourself crazy trying to figure out who wrote what. . . . But whoever came up with the fine line, 'When I meet new people, they're usually dead,' should pat himself on the back." --The New York Times Book Review
"A terrific book . . . Put Crime Scene at the top of your reading pile." -- Bookreporter
"A character-driven, intricately plotted whodunit . . . Mystery readers will devour the book and look forward to the next father and son collaboration." --Press Republican
Author Notes
Jonathan Kellerman is one of the world's most popular authors. He has brought his expertise as a child psychologist to 16 consecutive bestselling novels of suspense, including The Butcher's Theater, Jerusalem, and Billy Straight and 32 previous Alex Delaware novels, translated into two dozen languages. He is also the author of numerous essays, short stories, and scientific articles, two children's books, and three volumes on psychology, including Savage Spawn: Reflections on Violent Children.
(Publisher Provided)
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Clay Edison, the hero of this disappointing series launch from bestseller Kellerman and son Jesse (The Golem of Paris), was a promising college basketball player until a devastating injury ended any hopes of a professional sports career. Years later, Clay works as a deputy for the Alameda County, Calif., coroner's bureau. A routine call ends up involving him in a complicated investigation. Walter Rennert, a retired psychology professor, apparently died from falling down the stairs at his Berkeley home, but his daughter, Tatiana Rennert-Delavigne, suspects murder. Tatiana's father and a graduate student, Nicholas Linstad, ran a study that ended violently when one of their subjects murdered a girl. That subject, a minor, was released from prison about a decade earlier, shortly before Linstad took a similar fatal tumble. Clay's attraction to Tatiana sways him to dig deeper into her father's death. The familiar story line isn't enhanced by pretentious prose. When Clay shoots a basketball, he "felt the weightless instant, when gravity releases its stranglehold, and you float, and the ball becomes vapor, pebbled breath rolling back against the tips of your fingers." Fans of the senior Kellerman's long-running Alex Delaware series will enjoy seeing Alex make a cameo appearance. Agent: Barney Karpfinger, Karpfinger Agency. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Kellerman Senior (Heartbreak Hotel, 2017, etc.) and Junior (Potboiler, 2012, etc.) team up again in this tale of a case so cold it's been marked solved for years.No matter what his daughter says, all the evidence suggests that former Berkeley psychology professor Walter Rennert died of natural causes after falling down a flight of stairs in his own home. But Tatiana Rennert-Delavigne tells Deputy Clay Edison, of the Alameda County Coroner's Bureau, that she can't forget the remarkably similar death 12 years ago of Rennert's graduate student Nicholas Linstad. Rennert and Linstad had already achieved the worst kind of fame imaginable when Julian Triplett, one of the subjects they'd chosen for a study of how exposure to violent images affects learning and impulse control, fatally stabbed Rennert's lab assistant, Berkeley undergrad Donna Zhao, back in 1993, and Tatiana would dearly love to see her father posthumously vindicated of any role, however unwilling, in Donna's murder. As Clay quickly realizes, however, there's no obvious reason to reopen the case. Triplett confessed years ago and served his time in prison, and both Linstad and Rennert are dead, the latter of nothing more sinister than a ruptured aorta. So Clay, whose interest in Tatiana gradually develops an amatory dimension, has to battle everyone he meets, from uncooperative witnesses to the defensive counterparts who handled the original investigation to his own boss, who wants him to stick to his own caseload. Clay's own work on the case is unrelenting, and his heart is clearly in the right place, but neither the Kellermans' flat prose nor the dearth of interesting suspects nor the plodding detection generates much momentum. Even so, the hero's job gives his perspective welcome novelty, and the treatment is never less than professional. First of a series apparently aimed at readers willing to invest their time and attention in the hope of more excitement down the road. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
New York Review of Books Review
I'M going TO miss Kinsey Millhone. Ever since the first of Sue Grafton's Alphabet mysteries, "A Is for Alibi," came out in 1982, Kinsey has been a good friend and the very model of an independent woman, a gutsy California P.I. rocking a traditional man's job. The refreshing thing about Kinsey is that she doesn't pretend to be fearless when she's scared out of her wits. "I was not one of those defiant female types determined not to let a man threaten my peace of mind," she says wryly in Y IS FOR YESTERDAY (Marian Wood / Putnam, $29) after checking the four-inch space under her sofa bed for the vengeful killer who's stalking her. Grafton hasn't been coasting through the last letters of the alphabet; in fact, the plot of this new book is a complicated affair straddling two time periods and featuring players who manage to be equally unpleasant in both. In the current day (it's 1989 in Kinsey's world), the challenge is to find the person blackmailing the mother of Fritz McCabe, who has just been released from prison after serving time for the murder of a classmate at his private school back in 1979. Although Grafton seems to have put a lot of effort into this subsidiary narrative, the spoiled brats who get into serious trouble simply aren't worth worrying (or reading) about. Grafton is on safer ground with Kinsey's blackmail assignment, which involves some tricky detective work and features the usual cast of wonderful secondary characters. Pearl White, a shameless moocher who sets up a pup tent in the backyard and takes brazen advantage of Kinsey's landlord, is as good as they get. So is a mutt named Killer, who plays a key role in the story. But it's Kinsey herself who keeps this series so warm and welcoming. She's smart, she's resourceful, and she's tough enough to be sensitive on the right occasions, whether that means comforting a mother who's lost her only child or getting teary-eyed over an arthritic old dog who painfully rouses himself to greet her. If only more of the humans around Kinsey were as nice as the dogs. OPEN HART HANSON'S first novel, THE DRIVER (Dutton, $26), and meet the great guys who work at Oasis Limo Services. Lucky is an Army veteran who's stable enough to drive a car, but as an immigrant with phony papers (and an observant Muslim), he's got to watch his back. Ripple, a 19-yearold who lost most of both legs in Afghanistan, is the dispatcher, when he's not drawing violent cartoons. Tinkertoy, a genius with all things mechanical, has a scary case of post-traumatic stress paranoia. And then there's Michael Skellig, the former Army Special Forces sergeant who owns the business. Skellig is relatively sane, but he does hear the voices of men he's killed in battle and can't help wondering why they're so helpful. One of those voices ("troubletroubletroublebadtrouble") leads him into a near-death experience that saves the life of his client, a "Wunderkind skateboarding hip-hop mogul" who promptly tries to acquire Skellig for his entourage. Hanson's plotting is ragged and formulaic, but his storytelling voice is off the charts: blunt, morbid, morally indignant and furiously funny. FAIR WARNING: The title of Colin Cotterill's latest, the rat catchers' OLYMPICS (Soho Crime, $26.95), refers to a vivid fictional side event at the Summer Olympic Games held in Moscow in 1980. Since much of the free world is engaged in a boycott, the Soviet Union has extended a fully underwritten invitation to its socialist satellites. Delirious with joy at its good fortune, the impoverished Lao People's Democratic Republic musters up some country boys, innocent of athletic form and shoes, and sends them off on a hilarious, if perilous, adventure. Dr. Siri Paiboun, Laos's former national coroner and the eccentric amateur detective in Cotterill's surreal series, talks his way onto the delegation, which proves providential when a member of the shooting team disappears, replaced by a ringer. But the best fun is at the events themselves, watching the Laotian teams being cheered on by their raucous international supporters - even though that competitive side event offers their best chance at winning a medal. YOU COULD DRIVE yourself crazy trying to figure out who wrote what in CRIME SCENE (Ballantine, $28.99), a collaboration between Jonathan Kellerman and his son, Jesse Kellerman, who's written some good stuff of his own. (One hint: An interview with Dr. Alex Delaware must come from Kellerman pere, since that character figures in his own long-running series.) The amateur detective here is the narrator, Clay Edison, a meticulous and highly principled deputy coroner. Acting on his strong professional suspicion, Edison hesitates to rule the sudden death of Walter Rennert an accident without poking around in the man's life (and medicine chest). And when Rennert's daughter insists that her father was murdered, Edison has an authentic excuse to meddle. So who wrote what? Don't ask me. But whoever came up with the fine line, "When I meet new people, they're usually dead," should pat himself on the back. ? Marilyn STASIO has covered crime fiction for the Book Review since 1988. Her column appears twice a month.