29. Jonathan Kellerman - Self-Defence

I am back to reading a crime novel again. A genre that will keep my mind off of the fact I don't understand classic literature anymore. I did not even pick this book myself, because I won it at work (I love a job where you can get books as a reward, it makes me work harder). Despite all that, Jonathan Kellerman's Self-Defence is highly entertaining.

Apparently, he has a whole series of Alex Delaware novels. Delaware is a child psychologist who occasionally works for the LAPD and I just happened to read a book right in the middle of his career. It was written in 1995, which makes it the ninth book about Delaware. I didn't feel that mattered though. I could immediately understand the important details of the main characters and, luckily, in crime novels the whole plot starts at the start of the novel because they are not often continued into the next book. 

This one is about a girl Lucy Lowell who suffers from a recurrent nightmare after she stands jury for a trial against a horrible murderer. Together with Dr. Delaware she discovers these horrible dreams might be actual visions and scraps from her childhood. While Alex tries to unravel what this girl has seen in her childhood he gets deeper and deeper entangled in the Lowell's messy family history.

It's a mesmerising story and one of those books you really cannot put down because you want to know whodunit. At the beginning I was quite annoyed by the short sentence structures such as:

"She arrived five minutes late and apologizing. Smiling." (Kellerman 16)

And

"She introduced him as her brother, Peter, and he said, 'Nice to meet you' in a low, sleepy voice. We shook. (Kellerman 16)  

I think I was just affected temporarily by Dumas' intrinsic literary writing style and after reading him Kellerman is a bit of an amateur but a highly entertaining one at that.