Trouble

Starred review from October 30, 2006
Kellerman, the son of bestsellers Faye and Jonathan Kellerman, shows that his impressive debut, Sunstroke
, was no fluke with this gripping psychological page-turner that echoes the best of Hitchcock. Jonah Stem, a young medical resident at St. Agatha's, a midtown Manhattan teaching hospital, heroically intervenes when he encounters an attractive woman desperately fleeing a knife-wielding assailant early one morning on a street near Times Square. After Stem kills the man in self-defense, he enjoys a brief celebrity, but his life soon becomes complicated when the woman he rescued, Eve Gones, seeks him out and the two begin a frenzied affair. Taken aback by Gones's masochism, Stem attempts to end the relationship, but soon finds himself stalked relentlessly. Kellerman artfully conveys Stem's descent into near madness, making the step-by-step degradation of a decent man who was in the wrong place at the wrong time plausible and chilling. Author tour.

Scott Brick delivers a chilling performance as Jonah Stem, a sleep-deprived medical student. Brick's ominous tones make Jonah's life seem hellish from the start, and it gets worse after he saves a stranger named Eve from an attacker. For a time, Jonah becomes a media hero, and Brick reflects Jonah's dismay at the fuss. When he gets romantically involved with Eve and she proves to be as unstable as nitroglycerin, Brick convinces listeners that Jonah's rotation in the colorectal ward is a walk in the park compared to coping with Eve's ruthlessness. Relationship paranoia has rarely been as suspenseful, especially as delivered in Brick's riveting narration. Jonah's situation is proof that no good deed goes unpunished. S.J.H. (c) AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine