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Submitted for your consideration: Ardis Peake, resident of the Starkweather Hospital
for the Criminally Insane. Term of residency: decades, after the unspeakable annihilation
of his mother and a ranching family that had shown him nothing but kindness. Peake spends
his days and nights in a solitary, drug-induced stupor which is felt to be better for him,
and the world at large, than consciousness.
Outside of Starkweather lie the mean streets of Los Angeles in the closing days of the
twentieth century. A waiter-cum-actor is found dead, sawn in half, in a car trunk. Months
later, Dr. Claire Argent, a psychologist at Starkweather who had been treating Peake, is
found murdered in a similar way. Reports indicate that Peake, whose conversation is
normally limited to incoherent mumblings, may have had prescient knowledge of Dr. Argent's
murder. How is this possible? This is the mystery that psychologist Alex
Delaware and Detective Milo Sturgis must solve in MONSTER.
MONSTER is the thirteenth --- and best --- of Jonathan Kellerman's novels featuring Dr.
Delaware. Kellerman dedicates MONSTER to the memory of Kenneth Millar. Millar, under the
pen name Ross MacDonald, wrote a series of novels featuring detective Lew Archer, which
functions as no less than a written documentary of postwar Los Angeles. Kellerman, with
MONSTER and most of his previous Delaware novels, continues the tradition, painting a
sharp, brilliant picture of Southern California at the end of the millennium.
Kellerman's work, however, is not merely an honorific pastiche of MacDonald's. These
novels stand entirely on their own. And while Kellerman brings his extensive background in
psychology to bear in MONSTER, he also shows a strong familiarity with police work. It is
no less than fascinating to watch Delaware and Sturgis slowly, painstakingly, connect the
dots between Peake's incoherent mumblings and a rapidly increasing body count in the
outside world. Delaware and Sturgis are drawn into a pattern of manipulation, pathological
hatred, and vengeance, demonstrating that some of the worst monsters dwell, none too
quietly, among us.
Kellerman's considerable and multifaceted talents are on full display with the publication
of MONSTER and, as with his other Delaware novels, he demonstrates that he is perhaps the
natural successor to Raymond Chandler and Ross MacDonald as the chronologer of the quiet
underbelly of life in Southern California. While his subject matter is somewhat
disquieting, it is ultimately a pleasure to watch a master at work, and Kellerman, in
MONSTER, is a master at the top of his game.
--- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub
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