Bad Love

In the newest Alex Delaware mystery abusive child psychiatrists create psychopathic adults. After receiving a threatening tape of a familiar-sounding voice, child psychologist/detective Delaware realizes he's being stalked. The narrator does justice to the main character's voice, but fares less well with those of other characters, particularly women and people with accents. Some production values are uneven; the sound needs adjustment with each cassette. However, the overall presentation proves to be a treat due to the story itself. E.F. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine

January 3, 1994
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 . '' Initially he ties the threats to his work with two young sisters whose father, in prison for the murder of their mother, is claiming visitation rights. But Alex also remembers the phrase ``bad love'' was used by a child psychiatrist honored at a 1979 symposium he cosponsored at the hospital. A file search by his LAPD pal Milo Sturgis connects the phrase to two LA murders five and three years ago; inquiries by Alex reveal a surprisingly high death rate among speakers at the symposium. After more murders and harsher threats, the trails converge in a confrontation with a psychotic killer. Kellerman constructs his plot as adeptly as Robin Castagna, Alex's live-in lover, builds her prized guitars, but the decades-past motivation, the tangled connections among victims and Alex's peripheral association with the murderer foster a clinical detachment from the story's events. BOMC selection.