Obsession

Special thanks to Cheeseburger for the birthday gift I received last week (even though my birthday is still three weeks away). Oddly, I had just ordered several books from Amazon.com and asked for them to be shipped to my work address. So when Chicken told me a package from Amazon was waiting for me on my front porch, I was all, "WTF, Amazon?" Turns out it wasn't one of the books I ordered after all.

OBSESSION is the latest Alex Delaware thriller from author Jonathan Kellerman. Delaware is a crime-fighting, ass-kicking child psychologist (!) who has starred in at least a dozen whodunits, usually slightly kinky, but rarely more outrageous than your standard made-for-TV movie. This time, Delaware is approached by a teenage woman whom he treated briefly when she was a child. Her mother, a registered nurse who was something of a saint to those around her, has died of a terminal illness, and made a vague deathbed confession to her daughter that she may have murdered someone. So she asks Dr. Delaware, who has become somewhat famous in the Los Angeles area for solving murders, to look into it, which he does, along with his best pal, the gruff but gay homicide detective Milo Sturgis.

I blazed through OBSESSION in less than three days (yes, I see the irony), which is not as difficult as it sounds. Kellerman's novels read like screenplays, heavy on dialogue and plot twists, light on overly florid descriptions, with lots of one- or two-sentence paragraphs. I'm actually surprised no film producer has ever attempted a series of Delaware movies. I read several years ago that some company had purchased the rights to do some mysteries for television, but that never panned out. I usually picture Alec Baldwin as Delaware; he would have been perfect as a big-screen Delaware. Maybe John Larroquette for TV. Back then, that is; I don't know who I would cast now.