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Summary
Summary
Unabridged CDs, 8 CDs, 10 hours
Read by TBA
A masterful, inventive thriller from a remarkably assured and always surprising young writer.
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Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
At the start of this outstanding novel of psychological suspense, Kellerman's fourth (after The Genius), 30-year-old philosophy grad student Joseph Geist finds himself at loose ends after being suspended from Harvard (for failing to do any work) and breaking up with his longtime girlfriend. When Geist answers an ad in the Harvard Crimson seeking a serious "conversationalist," he ends up being paid to debate free will for a few hours a day with Alma Spielmann, an elderly woman of Viennese origin. After the two bond, Spielmann offers Geist free room and board at her Cambridge house, where she lives alone. The sudden appearance of Spielmann's difficult nephew, who relies on Spielmann's financial support, threatens Geist's comfortable relationship with his benefactor. The plot builds to a climax that's as devastating as it is plausible. Few thriller writers today are as gifted as Kellerman at using lucid and evocative prose in the service of an intense and nail-biting story. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Joseph Geist sees himself as a man of grand ideas. He clothes are tattered. He owns only a few books and a half bust of Nietzsche. But after eight years of study and professing, he's bounced from Harvard's Ph.D. program in philosophy, and a disagreement with his lover gets him bounced from her apartment. Broke and virtually homeless, he answers an ad in the Crimson for a Conversationalist. Six weeks after beginning his duties, Joseph is invited to move into the grand Victorian home of Alma, his brilliant, witty, and cultured employer-interlocutor. Joseph develops a deep respect and affection for the septuagenarian and, after much philosophical rumination, concludes that he's never been happier. But his idyll soon becomes a nightmare. Kellerman's novel is certainly character-driven, and Geist, the ascetic, intellectual student of free will, drives it until it drives him. The philosopher is seduced by ease and soon succumbs to other less-than-noble emotions: covetousness, jealousy, panic, and hysteria. There's a subtle but gnawing inevitability to this very closely observed, engaging portrait of an eternal sophomore.--Gaughan, Thomas Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
There are eerie echoes of Barbara Vine in THE EXECUTOR (Putnam, $25.95), Jesse Kellerman's stunning novel of psychological suspense: the clinical dissection of a mind that refuses to examine itself; the disintegration of moral boundaries when such a mind develops a fixation; the macabre humor of people who think too much; and, most unnerving, a certain playful cruelty about matters of life and death. At first, Kellerman seems to be taking an easy satiric poke at that pathetic specimen of academic life, the perennial student. After six years of graduate study at Harvard, Joseph Geist has yet to produce the dissertation on free will that will earn him his degree in philosophy. His funds have dried up, his girlfriend has tossed him out of her apartment, and all he has to his name are a duffel bag of rumpled clothes and a half-bust of Nietzsche, bought at a flea market in East Berlin. Ejected from the warmth of the academic womb, he answers an ad in The Harvard Crimson for a "conversationalist" and finds himself being paid to chat about philosophy with Alma Spielmann, an elderly Viennese woman parched for intelligent dialogue. Enchanted by his patron's lively mind, Geist accepts her invitation to move into her large Victorian home and, despite the discrepancy in their ages and her frail health (not to mention her addiction to soap operas), believes he has finally found his Platonic soul mate. At this point, it seems relevant to note that "Geist" translates from the German as "mind," while "Alma" is Spanish for "soul." But it also seems appropriate to question Geist's veracity as a narrator. For all his idyllic renderings of the life of the mind he now enjoys with Alma, Geist is too fearful to examine it realistically. And when her grasping nephew puts a bad thought in his head, he hasn't the intellectual fiber to challenge its premise. "Language ought not to be waved around like a loaded gun," Geist declares, pledging his commitment to cool, logical deliberation. But once he embraces that bad thought, he's so lost to logic, so driven by circumstance, you begin to wonder if free will is nothing more than a cosmic joke. Readers unfamiliar with Adelia Aguilar's adventures as "mistress of the art of death" are quickly brought up to speed in A MURDEROUS PROCESSION (Putnam, $25.95), the fourth in a high-spirited series of romantic suspense novels by Ariana Franklin set in 12th-century England. In brief: Adelia was a foundling, raised in Sicily by a Jewish doctor and his Christian wife, also a doctor. She was trained in autopsy at the Salerno School of Medicine, then summoned to England by King Henry II, along with the Arab eunuch who accompanies her everywhere. The mistress of a bishop, she's in constant peril of being burned as a witch for her heathen healing methods. Once these and other particulars of her complicated biography are dispensed with, Adelia is free to take to the road, where excitement and danger live, as personal physician to the king's 10-year-old daughter, Joanna, bound for Sicily to be married to King William II. This arduous journey is made even more perilous by the secret presence of a madman in the royal entourage, bent on revenging himself on Adelia for taking the life of his lover. But even his murderous mischief pales when compared with the barbaric cruelties exacted by the church on heretics and other social misfits, or even with the day-to-day ordeal of life in a dark, superstitious age. Declan Hughes isn't just another gruff voice in the barking crowd of noir crime writers. His characters have depth, his scenes have drama, and his sentences have grace. If only this gifted Irish writer didn't feel compelled to follow the American genre practice of writing for maximum horror, CITY OF LOST GIRLS (Morrow/HarperCollins, $24.99) is burdened with a serial killer who couldn't coax a victim into his car if he had a three-ring circus in the back seat. But the characters who count - a famous Hollywood director who returns home to Dublin to make a movie about its historic red-light district, as well as the women he mistreated and the friends he betrayed - are substantial figures with considerable heart. Ed Loy, the private eye who keeps this series on the up-and-up, is no cliché either. Although he comes with his own sad history and battles the bottle to forget it, Loy has a strong work ethic, doesn't take himself too seriously ("Maybe I am broody. Is that a sin?") and has the wit to appreciate a good comic-book store. FREEZE FRAME (Poisoned Pen, $24.95) finds Peter May's clever sleuth, Enzo Macleod, taking on the fourth of seven cold cases he accepted on a bet with the author of a book about famous unsolved crimes. The formula is a neat one, going back to the golden age of detective fiction, when stout men in club chairs puffed on after-dinner cigars as they pondered brain-teasing puzzles involving timetables and exotic poisons. May treats the conventions with all due respect; but this being the 21st century, he also contrives to have Macleod hop into bed with the lady in the story, the daughter-in-law of a professor of tropical medicine who was murdered 20 years earlier in his island home off the coast of Brittany. Nothing has been moved from his study, which still awaits someone to decipher the cryptic messages the professor left for his son, who died before he could read them. Although May obviously (and justifiably) prides himself on his grasp of the plot mechanics, something must be said for his vivid settings, which remove the story from the library and send it out into the wide, wide world. The narrator of Jesse Kellerman's latest suspense novel is paid to chat with an eccentric old woman.
Library Journal Review
So here's the setup: Joseph, a Harvard philosophy graduate student, has just been kicked out by his girlfriend and needs a job and a place to live. He responds to an ad for a "conversationalist" and is hired by enigmatic octogenarian Alma, who was a philosophy student herself decades earlier in Austria. Then Joseph moves in. It's a charmed life, briefly, until Alma dies and he reaches a moral crossroads. There's her drug-addled nephew to contend with, and a couple of curious police officers wondering about the circumstances of Alma's death. Violence ensues, and from then on, it's pure torture for Joseph and the reader, really. VERDICT The buildup is excruciatingly slow-think bad Dostoyevsky-and the protagonist so unsympathetic that it's difficult to care about his quandaries. Kellerman incorporates clever and classic elements, but his fourth novel (after The Genius) would have sufficed as a taut short story of psychological suspense. This is only for those intrigued by philosophical questions and moral debates. Anticipate some demand from the literary thriller set but hope for a more energetic pace with his next title. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 12/09.]-Teresa L. Jacobsen, Solano Cty. Lib, Fairfield, CA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
