Crime & Beyond Book Club Reads Jesse and Jonathan Kellerman's Crime Scene

The Denver-based book club Crime & Beyond recently discussed a new book by father and son team Jesse and Jonathan Kellerman, and Kerry Hammond is here to tell us what they thought.

Crime & Beyond met this month to discuss the first book in a new series written by Jesse Kellerman and Jonathan Kellerman, a father & son writing team. Jonathan Kellerman has written the widely successful Alex Delaware mystery series, which contains 33 books to date. Jesse has written five solo novels and the two have teamed up twice before: writing The Golem of Hollywood and The Golem of Paris, a series billed as genre crossing psychological thrillers.

Crime Scene is the first book in a new series featuring former athlete turned San Francisco Deputy Coroner, Clay Edison. The book was a New York Times bestseller in its first week on the stands and it made its way to our club’s short list soon after. In the book we meet Clay and his merry band of co-workers at the coroner’s office. He is sent to the crime scene where a retired professor, Rennert, has fallen to his death. It is presumably an open and shut case; a death that no one had a hand in causing. The problem is, he meets the dead man’s daughter and she claims he was murdered.

Clay takes it upon himself to look further into the death, uncovering two more in the process; one a brutal killing of a college student and another of a colleague of Rennert’s who was involved in a college study gone wrong. Clay is unable to let the case go and spends his time digging deeper into the other two deaths to try and answer questions about his current case.

Our reviews of the book were all across the board. Some loved Clay and some didn’t. Some found his investigation plausible and others unbelievable. Many of us loved the cameo made by the Alex Delaware character and others felt it was contrived. The bottom line is that we delved into the many aspects of the story and it led to a great discussion. Many of us will continue with the series to see how the authors develop this new character and what new cases he will investigate.