2007: #92 – When the Bough Breaks (Jonathan Kellerman)
Book #92 was When the Bough Breaks, the first book in Jonathan Kellerman’s Alex Delaware series. The back of the book reads:
In the first Alex Delaware novel, Dr. Morton Handler practiced a strange brand of psychiatry. Among his specialties were fraud, extortion, and sexual manipulation. Handler paid for his sins when he was brutally murdered in his luxurious Pacific Palisades apartment. The police have no leads, but they do have one possible witness: seven-year-old Melody Quinn.
It’s psychologist Dr. Alex Delaware’s job to try to unlock the terrible secret buried in Melody’s memory. But as the sinister shadows in the girl’s mind begin to take shape, Alex discovers that the mystery touches a shocking incident in his own past.
This connection is only the beginning, a single link in a forty-year-old conspiracy. And behind it lies an unspeakable evil that Alex Delaware must expose before it claims another innocent victim: Melody Quinn.
The Alex Delaware series is one of the first I read in this genre, probably 15 years ago. Of course, I started in the middle of the series and had yet to get around to the first books.
This was okay. I got a little bogged down in the mystery because a lot of the characters were similar to each other and I sometimes forgot who was being referred to. There was a lot of “the bad guy explains the entire scheme” at the end. However, it was worth it to see how Alex starts working for the police and the beginnings of his friendship with Milo and relationship with Robin.
Page count: 351 | Word count: 113,145