When the CGM book club announced that we’d be reading Dr. Death, the latest bestseller by Jonathan Kellerman, I thought, “Oh wonderful, a non-gay book, at last!” Those of you who are Kellerman fans probably chuckled just then, as it goes to show how unread I was on Kellerman. Needless to say, the subtitle “an Alex Delaware Novel” didn’t ring any bells for me. Turns out, Alex Delaware is a psychologist usually assigned to cases being handled by his good friend Milo Sturgis, who is a detective with the LAPD. Milo, as you discover on page 2 of this book, is an openly gay man.
However, this is not a gay novel. Homosexuality in this novel appears in much the same way that the good witch appears in The Wizard of Oz, in the beginning, the middle and end. Milo’s girth is much more interesting to Kellerman than his homosexuality, and frankly, that brings about some pretty funny reading.
With detectives and psychologists as main characters, it doesn’t take much to guess that this is a whodunit story. It is indeed, but with lots of room to dwell on all sorts of issues.
The story opens with the gruesome details of the murder of an Eldon Mate, a fictional and much more fanatical and outspoken version of Dr. Kevorkian. Mate had helped, prior to his demise, 50 patients “travel”; that is, commit suicide. Traveler number 51 was supposed to as routine as the others, but somehow Eldon himself ended up attached to his “Humanitron.”
As the investigation into Eldon’s life unfolds, a large cast of characters parade on by, and the reader is left small bits of information that make most of them potential suspects. Some of them are friends of Alex which leads to conflict of interest issues which are largely kept consciously under the rug. Alex’s motivation in the case appears to derive more at times to prove innocence rather than guilt.
The social commentary begins with assisted suicide itself, which seems to get a thumbs down here from Kellerman. His Eldon Mate is the kind of guy who, if he had lived a few years longer, might have been talking about space ships and aliens. Moreover, much of the motivation for violence in this book stems from the survivors of the so-called “happy travelers” who believe that the victim didn’t actually want suicide after all.
Also given excellent treatment are the various stresses and traumas that inflict young people. This isn’t too surprising when you consider that some of the books Kellerman has written on this very subject are nonfiction. Alex spends a lot of time with Stacy, a young woman he helped overcome the loss of her mother, one of Mate’s travelers. Hence the conflict of interest. Stacy is a fairly normal kid sandwiched between a mother who checked out, a distant and overbearing father, and a brilliant but unstable older brother.
Homosexuality gets an excellent, poignant treatment in the middle of the book, when a lawyer confides to Alex that he might not have lost his son if he had been more open minded to the thing. The regret that hangs over this man’s head is remarkable. I felt comfortable with the idea that Kellerman could write gay novels if he wanted to. More importantly, though, it staged the kind of mental processing that a survivor of a suicide victim goes through.
Homosexuality factors in quite unexpectedly at the end of the book, and at first blush, in a negative light. But I think it is unfair to think that the ending is a somehow a statement equating homosexuality with pedophilia. If you step back, most of the characters and relationships in the book are dysfunctional, except for that of Alex/Robin, and Milo/Rick, so I didn’t get upset at this. The price paid for the deed, though, was pretty severe.
This is a great nothing-better-to-do book that reads pretty fast.