The cases that involve toddlers are the least bearable to read. Delaware is also particularly in a "dark" mood throughout this novel, so he's just not that much fun to read.

A bewildering conglomeration of psycho-babble!

Troy Turner and Rand Duchay were barely teenagers, little more than children themselves, when they kidnapped and murdered a young child. Troy, clearly the instigator and an evil sociopath lasts mere weeks in prison and receives his just desserts shanked by a fellow inmate. Rand, a somewhat more pathetic slow-witted dysfunctional creature who appears to have been relentlessly drawn into the deed of kidnapping by bad company somehow survives his incarceration. Upon his release he seeks to talk with psychologist, Alex Delaware, whom he encountered briefly during his trial for the murder eight years earlier. Delaware, who only reluctantly agrees to talk with him, is shocked to find Duchay murdered mere minutes before the planned conversation can take place.

Rage, an aptly titled psychological thriller, place Delaware and his police colleague, Milo Sturgis, into a complex battle of hide and seek with a brutal, psychopathic serial killer.

In marked, almost stark contrast with some of his current best-selling colleagues such as James Patterson, Jonathan Kellerman has chosen to focus his novels on the psychological aspects of crime - motive, character, deviance, emotion, passion - and Rage takes this approach to story-telling to levels beyond any he has previously attempted. So much so, in fact, that the thrill of the story is mostly buried in a web of convoluted, puzzling dialogue between Sturgis and Delaware in which they simply feed off one another in a stacked series of "what-ifs". One dysfunctional misfit after another is introduced, anaylyzed and set up as the possible mastermind of a series of brutal, evil killings. The conversation becomes so dense and the analysis becomes so complex that ultimately the evil devolves into something almost banal and the story is lost in a thicket of psycho-babble.

Rage is far from Kellerman's best efforts and ranks as almost boring beside such phenomenal successes as The Murder Book.

Paul Weiss

Good start and setup, but it doesn't tie together very well and it gets too twisted.

Eight years ago two young boys killed a younger child. Alex Delaware was asked to evaluate them by the judge to see if they should be tried as adults. The case was resolved with a plea bargain - the younger of the boys was killed shortly after being sentenced. The other boy is now out and has called Alex wanting to talk to him. By the time Alex gets to the meeting point he's nowhere to be seen. Then Detective Milo Sturgis calls - a body has been found. The ensuing investigation leads to all kinds of theories but they narrow their focus to one man and what he's been doing sickens them both. Another enjoyable read in this series by Jonathan Kellerman.