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It is a blessing and a curse to be the offspring of famous parents. Accordingly, let's get the issue out of the way right now: yes indeed, Jesse Kellerman is the son of Jonathan and Faye Kellerman. Jesse already has made his own mark, being better known at this point as a playwright than as an author. That may change, however, given the strength of his debut novel.
SUNSTROKE is one of those books that defies proper characterization. Does it have elements of mystery and suspense? Yes, it does. Yet it meanders and slips and slides in and out of those genres, providing an episodic character study set against the background of Mexico, in an unsettling village where there are two rules: 1) there are no rules; and 2) the rules keep changing.
The novel is told from the viewpoint of Gloria Mendez, a thirty-something secretary who is quietly and hopelessly in love with Carl Perreira, her boss of a decade or so. Perreira, a pleasant but enigmatic loner, has never given her cause to hope; Mendez's desire for something other than an unrequited love comes to an end when Perreira disappears while on vacation in Mexico. His last contact with her was a cryptic, garbled cell phone message about an accident.
Unable to elicit much interest in Perreira's disappearance, Mendez goes to Mexico with the intent of finding him at best, or determining his fate at worst; she finds much more than she expected. The man she has come to love from afar has a surprising past, one that collides with the present and will affect the lives of people beyond the missing Perreira. The reader though ultimately learns more about Mendez than her missing boyfriend.
Kellerman doesn't exhibit sympathy here so much as a remarkable and touching empathy for Mendez, a Hispanic woman. He also displays a quiet descriptive brilliance, particularly in his accounts of those last few miles of U.S. Highway that one encounters when leaving San Diego for Mexico, as well as for the ironically named Aguas Vivas, a small, all-but-deserted town in Mexico where the dead find their final resting place. It might be argued though that Kellerman's pacing is flawed in spots; but upon reading the novel in its entirety, one cannot help but conclude that there is a method to Kellerman's occasional meandering. His apparent sidetracks ultimately deal with Mendez, an intriguing character in her own right.
With SUNSTROKE Kellerman establishes that he is going to be very much his own man from a topical standpoint. At the same time, however, SUNSTROKE demonstrates that the apple not only doesn't fall far from the tree, but also quickly seeds and grows roots of its own. This is an impressive, memorable debut.
--- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub
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