Crime writing is in Jesse Kellerman's blood
Lucy Clark
From: The Sunday Mail (Qld)
April 03, 2010

IN COMMERCIAL crime fiction circles, the name Kellerman brings with it a fair amount of baggage.
Not that that's a bad thing for Jesse, son of the bestselling authors Faye and Jonathan Kellerman. Clearly there's some sort of cachet being a writer so named, and it can't be bad for sales.
On the other hand, the Kellerman parents write undemanding, quick reads to formula, but you can expect more with Kellerman Jr. He has distinguished himself as a man of originality, a writer with his own style in a genre of interchangeable styles.

His fourth novel, The Executor (Sphere, A$32.99), proves this once again – it's no formulaic crime thriller but an intriguing psychological drama, clever and well written.
It's the story of a young man, Joseph Geist, a professional philosophy student who at the age of 30 has just been kicked out of the doctorate program at Harvard because for too long he's been going nowhere with his thesis on the subject of Free Will.
About the same time, his girlfriend kicks him out of her flat and he answers a strange ad in the local Boston paper: "Conversationalist wanted".
In a big old house Joseph encounters Alma Spielmann, a wealthy, lonely and elderly Austrian woman who seeks lively and meaningful conversation about the big questions of life and in Joseph, student philosopher, she finds a worthy debating companion.
Alma pays Joseph to engage in lively conversation on a daily basis, and the slacker philosopher can't believe his luck.
The two become friends, and soon Alma invites Joseph to move into a spare bedroom and life is sweet until the arrival of Alma's manipulative drifter of a nephew Eric, who Joseph immediately dislikes and distrusts.
Kellerman excels in the descent-into-hell narrative, and he surely plots Joseph's loss of his grasp on the cushy life he has been handed.
The author neatly integrates Joseph's childhood into the story as he shows him to be a man of inaction for most of his life. It's fascinating to see what drives this man to action and what sort of action he eventually takes (to reveal more would be to spoil the story, but it's shocking and compelling, and there will be blood).
On the way Kellerman threads in matters philosophical. Alma herself is an intriguing character with her own murky past, which includes interaction with some of Europe's great philosophers, and her own unpublished dissertation on the subject of Free Will.
The full review at the Brisbane Courier Mail online.