Killer

by Jonathan Kellerman

Reviewed by Coral

Compared to his work with Milo, Alex’s consulting work for the court on custody cases is considerably less dangerous. But emotions can run high in these cases, like his most recent one that finds two sisters fighting for custody over a baby. Though Cherie is the baby’s mother, her older sister Connie believes her niece would be better off with her, given Cherie’s past misdemeanors and drug charges, not to mention the weeks she took off to follow a band leaving her baby behind with Connie.

It seems like an easy case for Alex, whose first impressions of Cherie are positive. But when Connie ends up dead and Cherie and the baby go missing, seemingly on the run, it calls his impressions into doubt. Could he have been so wrong about a patient? Could Cherie really have tricked him so completely that he missed all the signs that she was considering murdering her sister? With Milo’s help, Alex is determined to get to the bottom of this and solve Connie’s murder.

I never expect to be able to solve these cases, but normally I can find the motive to be believable. In this book, I had trouble accepting the motive, that what we were presented in the book could really be the line in the sand that caused everything after to happen.

Because the victim and suspects had been clients of his, Alex was benched from the investigation for chunks of it here and there. And because we weren’t following Milo as he investigated, it felt like the case wasn’t the main focus through these sections of the book. Mainly I found this to be the case whenever Alex was dealing with another former past patient, though I suppose he was peripherally connected to the case.

There was this line near the beginning of the book where the judge in Cherie and Connie’s case is saying the things that would make it easier for her to award custody to Connie and one of them was if Cherie is HIV positive. I found that line to be very offensive. How would being HIV positive make Cherie any better or worse at being a parent? What does one have to do with the other?

Grade: C