The girls of the BSC are in a huge fight, and Mary Anne feels caught in the middle. She isn't usually a leader in their group, but when the club leaves her alone to deal with a sick child, Mary Anne knows it's time to take charge.
Former child psychologist Jonathan Kellerman brings us the 11th installment in the reliable series featuring child psychologist Alex Delaware. Here Delaware teams up again with his old friend Detective Milo Sturgis of the LAPD to investigate the brutal murder of Dr. Hope Devane. Her bestselling book about how men victimize women made her famous; did it also lead to her death? As Sturgis and Delaware begin probing into the details of her life, they find more and more secrets and slowly close in on a killer filled with hate. As usual, Kellerman combines convincing psychological portraits with good dialogue and a plot that coils to a tense finish.
The latest Dr. Alex Delaware novel, after Devil's Waltz , follows the child psychologist on an intricately plotted, murder-strewn course that started 20 years earlier when he was on staff at a Los Angeles children's hospital. Recently, Alex has become the target of ominous threats: weird laughter over the phone, a fish from his pond cruelly skewered, a tape of a child's voice repeating the words "bad love .
All but one of these stories feature and are about children or animals. They don't have a "story" structure--they're more the sort of slice of life that came into style in the first third of the 20th century, many years after Chekhov put them together. They show Chekhov's immense sympathy for the downtrodden, the off-the-gird, the under-the-radar. His kids look at the world in innocent confusion; his animals think not like humans (or like animals) but like isolated points of wonder. Psychologically, the child tales would hardly pass, but as examinations of the underlife that exists everywhere, largely unacknowledged, they are superb snippets.
Ernest Cook Poole (1880–1950) was a U.S. novelist. He was born in Chicago, Illinois on January 23, 1880, and graduated from Princeton University in 1902. He worked as a journalist and was active in promoting social reforms including the ending of child labor. Poole's novel concerns a woman who marries her dead sister's husband and helps restore his artistic vocation.
