The Conspiracy Club (Hardcover)

by Jonathan Kellerman (Author) "RAGING EMOTIONS, DEAD TISSUE..." (more)
Key Phrases: mental health army, trumps virtue, old eccentrics, Tina Balleron, Arthur Chess, Norbert Levy (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Kellerman re-invigorates a number of tried-and-true mystery conventions in this gripping, intricately plotted, non-Alex Delaware stand-alone novel of psychological suspense. A psychologist at City Central Hospital, Jeremy Carrier, is attempting to put his life back together after the brutal murder of his girlfriend, Jocelyn, when he is approached by elderly Dr. Arthur Chess with an offer of friendship. Jeremy, still too traumatized by Jocelyn's death to attempt even the most casual of relationships, initially rejects Chess's solicitation. After further conversation, he accepts an invitation to an elegant dinner at a very private club with Chess and five other older men and women of high intellectual and social rank, all of whom have an extreme interest in crime and the nature of evil. Just as a halting, tentative rapport with fellow doctor Angela Rios begins to develop, Jeremy receives the first in a series of mysterious, anonymous messages. By piecing these messages together with other clues from Dr. Chess, he comes to understand that someone is trying to point him toward the killer of his beloved Jocelyn and a number of other local women. Kellerman is a master at building character and slowly unfolding events, divulging just the right amount of information. Jeremy uncovers more murders, both past and present, and eventually realizes he's had everything wrong from the very beginning. Savvy mystery readers will not be surprised that the likable Jeremy finally comes to the correct conclusions and identifies the killer, earns the respect of his elderly friends and the love of his new lady.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Readers devoted to Alex Delaware may miss the L.A. psychologist, who has entertained them with more than a dozen mysteries. But not for long; Kellerman's Jeremy Carrier has a lot of similarities to his literary precursor, including his profession. Unlike Delaware, thirtysomething Carrier isn't in private practice, but his occupation still gets him inside people's heads. Unfortunately, it's his own emotional state that needs leveling out. Still reeling from the brutal murder of his girlfriend, for which he's long been under suspicion, Carrier is barely able to attend to his patients let alone handle his own grief and anger. Then four things happen: he meets attractive Dr. Angela Rios; he's invited to dine with an odd group, each of whom, he eventually learns, has suffered an unresolved loss; he begins receiving strange articles in his office mail; and murders bearing a definite similarity to his lover's horrific death begin happening again. It's a bit of a chore to get past Jeremy's angst at the outset, but once Carrier catches on to the clues, things move along much faster. The best part, though, is the end: just when you think Carrier has it figured out, there's one last odd twist. Suspend disbelief and follow along. Stephanie Zvirin
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Ballantine Books; First Edition edition (November 25, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0345452577
• ISBN-13: 978-0345452573
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.1 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.9 out of 5 stars See all reviews (123 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #715,252 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars What happened here?, March 3, 2004

By	Brian Reaves (Anniston, AL USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Kellerman is best known for his Alex Delaware novels, and rightfully so. When an author wants to break from a popular character, there's always the possibility of scepticism from the readers. Some authors are able to make this work (Jeffrey Deaver, for example). Others fall flat, as Mr. Kellerman has on this one. I honestly don't know what happened here. This is perhaps the slowest paced novel I've ever read from a veteran author. How this ever got past his agent or editor I'll never know. You are well over halfway through the book before anything happens, and I'm not exaggerating here in the least. It's almost like following someone's boring life with morbid curiousity for a while, waiting for something to go wrong. The ending, when it mercifully comes, isn't worth the build up. The Conspiracy Club from the book's title really doesn't do anything that a single character couldn't have done. It's like this is a novel he'd written years ago but put away and suddenly he had a deadline and had to grab it. The potential for a great story was here, but it would have meant losing the first half of the book and starting from there. I look forward to his next novel, but I hope it'll be back to his old standard of great storytelling.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A First-Rate Read with a Great New Protagonist, November 26, 2003

By	Bookreporter.com (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

The first Jonathan Kellerman book I ever read did not feature Alex Delaware. It was a novel titled THE BUTCHER'S THEATER, and though I read it almost 15 years ago, I can still remember passages of that book as if I had read them yesterday. I've read almost all of Kellerman's fiction since that time, including every Delaware novel, so I approached THE CONSPIRACY CLUB with some mixed feelings. I was slightly disappointed that this was not going to be another Delaware novel. But Kellerman's work, whether it involves Delaware or not, is so uniformly excellent that a deviation from his normal characterization would almost certainly be interesting.

Now, having spent a day or so reading THE CONSPIRACY CLUB, I can tell those of you who are diehard Delaware fans that, if you skip this excellent novel because Alex Delaware is not in it, you are cheating yourself. And if you're not already a fan of Kellerman, THE CONSPIRACY CLUB is the key to becoming one. Notwithstanding my familiarity with Kellerman's work, I felt as if I was discovering a debut novel by a new author who had studied at the feet of the masters and was channeling them.

The book is excellent in every way. The characters are unforgettable, the dialogue is witty when it should be and dark when appropriate. The plotting is so intelligent yet straightforward that you'll walk away from this great novel feeling smarter than you did when you first picked it up.

THE CONSPIRACY CLUB introduces Dr. Jeremy Carrier, a young staff psychologist at City Central Hospital in an unnamed Midwest city. Carrier is carrying around a boatload of grief since his passionate but all-too brief affair with a nurse named Jocelyn Banks was abruptly ended by her kidnapping and brutal murder. Carrier was initially a suspect in Banks's unsolved slaying, and Detective Bob Doresh has a disconcerting habit of popping into the hospital at odd times to ask Carrier off-kilter questions, just to let Carrier know that he's still under the magnifying glass. When another woman is murdered in an eerily and similarly grisly fashion, Doresh seems to be taking more than a polite interest in Carrier, a circumstance that creates even more sorrow and confusion for him. This is counterbalanced --- barely --- by Carrier's slowly developing relationship with Angela Rios, a hospital resident whose slow but sure emotional succor seems to put him on the road to recovery.

At the same time, an elderly, somewhat eccentric physician named Dr. Arthur Chess begins to take a gently incessant interest in Carrier. This interest culminates with Chess inviting Carrier to a mysterious late night formal supper. Chess and the other four guests, all individuals of wildly disparate backgrounds, treat Carrier well. He cannot help but feel, however, that he is there more to be observed and evaluated than anything else.

Almost simultaneously Carrier begins to receive a mysterious series of seemingly unconnected articles and messages through the hospital mailing system, correspondences that seem to be aiming him toward the identity of the true murderer of Banks and the other women. Kellerman, already a master of the suspense novel, takes the genre to new places here. Carrier is an empathetic psychologist, a master at sharing emotion with his patients, but he is not a detective. He lurches, in fits and starts, toward the true identity of the murderer, who is set to strike someone close to Carrier once again.

Carrier is a highly believable character. He is capable of giving comfort to his patients, even to those who seem unreachable, but is slow to accept and receive such comfort himself. Kellerman's account of Carrier's initial encounters with Rios is absolutely first-rate. What is even more remarkable, however, is Kellerman's ability to infuse his novels, and particularly this one, with realistic minor characters, who sometimes enter and exit within the space of a single page. One such character is a woman whom Carrier encounters while she is sweeping out a vacated bookstore in a building that is scheduled for demolition. The dialogue between the two characters goes on but for a few sentences, yet the woman's portrayal, primarily conveyed through her comments regarding her own behavior, is perfect. A character like this is not the stuff of literature so much as she is the essence of life. Even if her actions make no logical sense to her, the reader understands them immediately.

Carrier certainly has the potential to be an ongoing, sustaining character. He is too good a character to limit to one novel, even one as fine as THE CONSPIRACY CLUB.

--- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Huge dissapointment, February 4, 2005

By	Col Kev (Texas, USA) - See all my reviews

I usually enjoy the author's works, even the non-Alex Delaware ones, but not this one. I agree with the other reviewers that the characters were flat, some of the plot lines were never tied together well, and that the setting hints that this was a discarded attempt from the past that Kellerman rescued from the trash can...

But my main beef with this novel is the language! In some of his Alex Delaware novels, Kellerman turns off my interest with his grandeose architectual descriptions (I often think if he hadn't been a psychologist he would have been an architect), but this book is STUFFED with pompous, over-the-top language. I chuckled out loud at the reviewer who said he/she had multiple English degrees but still had to constantly run to the dictionary to look up Kellerman's obscure word choices. Kellerman's descriptions and dialogue during the secret dinner with Jeremy and the old eccentrics was just plain laughable.

One reviewer said it best when they said that they language was "forced, bombasic, and esoteric". Trust me - this book is painful drudgery to read for such a small payoff.