If you read between the lines of Kellerman's books, you are taught sensitive morality and gentle ethics. Funny thing is, it happens amongst the most horrifying criminal situations and macabre scenery: this author is clever, simultaneously hard and tender, sharp in his dialogues and plots, his idiosyncratic dress codes and beautiful psychological insights.
I just love it, the way he writes and without much effort (to my mind at least: I'm sure he must suffer through his manuscript's revisions to find perfection) offers you a glimpse of the mind's complexities as applied to common human behaviour. This novel isn't an exception, especially if you like to enter the theatre of teenager cruelty and spoiled elitism.
The story is, as I've come to expect from this writer, brutal and gruesome, involving rape and murder, power and wealth, predators, sexual promiscuity, hidden anguish and deadly sins. All suspense ingredients are there, ably mixed to turn a real thriller into a terrifying nightmare... But our two usual heroes, Alex and Milo, are there to achieve positive closure, with sarcastic humour and the reader's engrossing pleasure - Milo's interviewing skills are a special pleasure to appreciate and, all in all, Kellerman confirms his masterful technique: tell an execrable tale, but with a subliminal constructive lesson to offer.
I always close a Kellerman book with some regret in having finished it, but feeling ultimately good inside, no matter the horrors I have witnessed in reading it: I call that catharsis.