Rage - Jonathan Kellerman (**)

A bewildering conglomeration of psycho-babble!

Troy Turner and Rand Duchay were barely teenagers, little more than children themselves, when they kidnapped and murdered a young child. Troy, clearly the instigator and an evil sociopath lasts mere weeks in prison and receives his just desserts shanked by a fellow inmate. Rand, a somewhat more pathetic slow-witted dysfunctional creature who appears to have been relentlessly drawn into the deed of kidnapping by bad company somehow survives his incarceration. Upon his release he seeks to talk with psychologist, Alex Delaware, whom he encountered briefly during his trial for the murder eight years earlier. Delaware, who only reluctantly agrees to talk with him, is shocked to find Duchay murdered mere minutes before the planned conversation can take place.

"'Rage", an aptly titled psychological thriller, place Delaware and his police colleague, Milo Sturgis, into a complex battle of hide and seek with a brutal, psychopathic serial killer. In marked, almost stark contrast with some of his current best-selling colleagues such as James Patterson, Jonathan Kellerman has chosen to focus his novels on the psychological aspects of crime - motive, character, deviance, emotion, passion - and "Rage" takes this approach to story-telling to levels beyond any he has previously attempted.

So much so, in fact, that the thrill of the story is mostly buried in a web of convoluted, puzzling dialogue between Sturgis and Delaware in which they simply feed off one another in a stacked series of "what-ifs". One dysfunctional misfit after another is introduced, anaylyzed and set up as the possible mastermind of a series of brutal, evil killings. The conversation becomes so dense and the analysis becomes so complex that ultimately the evil devolves into something almost banal and the story is lost in a thicket of psycho-babble.

"Rage" is far from Kellerman's best efforts and ranks as almost boring beside such phenomenal successes as "The Murder Book".