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PSYCHOPATH

Name: PSYCHOPATH
Author: Keith Ablow
ISBN: 0-312-26671-5

by Keith Ablow ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 22, 2003

Only Thomas Harris does it more stylishly.

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Return of heroic alcoholic Frank Clevenger, forensic psychiatrist.

Clevenger was first met in full-blooming Denial (1997), wherein he kept gulping Scotch, bought coke on borrowed money, bought sex at nude dance bars, couldn’t pay his bills, hit up his mother for drug money, gambled, drove drunk, dug S&M. Denial ended with Clevenger still deluded. Compulsion (2002) found him trying to shake his demons while analyzing an infanticide on Nantucket. Ablow, himself a forensic psychologist, now takes a page from Hannibal Lecter: Clevenger this time out faces his mirror image, a demonically brilliant psychiatrist turned serial killer. In the stunning opening scene, Dr. Jonah Wrens drives his BMW along Route 90 outside Rome, New York, playing Mahler’s serene Tenth Symphony, thinking of Scott Fitzgerald’s The Crack-Up, and searching for a highway victim to seduce into soul-warmth before he razors open the victim’s carotids and orgasms while hugging the victim as his or her life ebbs away. Jonah leaves 14 bodies razored across 14 states before the FBI calls in Clevenger for analysis of the killer’s motives and way of working. Jonah is a traveling psychiatrist for kids severely impaired by mental illness and spends about six weeks at each hospital he attends. He’s now at Canaan (Vermont) Memorial’s low-socioeconomic children’s locked psychiatric unit, which has about 25 damaged kids for him to suck dry of their pains, as he does all his highway victims. His fractured mind allows him entry into unthinkable regions and to drug himself with other people’s demons and escape his guilts. Meanwhile, Clevenger has his own problems raising Billy Bishop, his adopted, pot-selling 16-year-old once accused of the Nantucket infanticide. Still, he chooses to flush out the Highway Killer. The New York Times publishes a letter from Jonah asking for Clevenger’s help in a correspondence. While very successful with damaged kids, Jonah via Clevenger strives to free himself from evil. Everyone says it: He’s the nicest guy in the world.

Only Thomas Harris does it more stylishly.

Pub Date: July 22, 2003

ISBN: 0-312-26671-5

Page Count: 336

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2003

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE ARCHITECT
by Keith Ablow

- BOOK REVIEW
MURDER SUICIDE
by Keith Ablow

- BOOK REVIEW
COMPULSION
by Keith Ablow

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BETWEEN SISTERS

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2003

Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...

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Sisters in and out of love.

Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?

Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.

Pub Date: May 1, 2003

ISBN: 0-345-45073-6

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE WOMEN
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE FOUR WINDS
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE GREAT ALONE
by Kristin Hannah

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

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A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.