re:mote voices

Title: The Conspiracy Club
Author: Jonathan Kellerman
Publisher:Headline

Jonathan Kellerman is one of those crime writers with an established character who he has written a whole load of books about. The Conspiracy Club is one of the few who don’t feature that character, making it a good starting point for dabbling with Kellerman’s work.

Jeremy is a psychiatrist at a city centre hospital, who has been coasting along on neutral since the murder of his nurse girlfriend. Until a couple of things happen to jump start him in someway – one is the murder of another girl, the return of the police asking him more questions, still the prime suspect in his own girlfriends murder; the other the approach of a respected old pathologist that works in the hospital, who starts some curious conversations.

With the murder of the second woman it is clear that there is still a killer out there, who is going to keep killing, and with little information Jeremy is going to remain on the suspect list. While after having had a dinner with the pathologist and his mysterious friends Jeremy starts to receive a stream of random articles, newspaper articles and the like. Which he gradually realises are all pieces of a puzzle, one with relevance to his own situation.

Kellerman works well at putting the clues out there and then distracting his protagonist, and in the process pulling along the reader in his wake. The pacing is surprisingly casual, working through the character and his thought processes – following him through his professional life, and his gradual willingness to have a personal one. Though of course as events hot up the pace goes with it, bringing events to a quick conclusion.