Psychopath
 Keith Russell Ablow
 (Reviewer - Rebecca Brown)
 2003 St. Martin's Press
 ISBN: 0312255715

Forensic psychiatrist Frank Clevenger returns to help solve the Highway Killer murders.

Thirteen bodies in shallow graves in thirteen states have been discovered, & the FBI is at a dead end. What clues there are to these ceremonial slayings link no one in their records, or to each murder. No one sees anything & there seems to be no reasons in the victims' lives for their murder.

Agent Whitney McCormick of the FBI calls on Frank Clevenger for a fresh perspective, an unconventional approach, even as her director places restrictions on the way Frank can run the case. Whitney, with a powerful father, an FBI director who became a Senator, has some ghosts of her own, & some mettle to prove.

Frank Clevenger, a man with his own demons past & present, is a reluctant team player, & it shows. Drugs, sex & rock'n'roll have been the motif of his life until he got the chance to do right by one of his patients whom he adopts. That patient-cum-son now pushes Frank's buttons in familiar ways all parents face.

Meanwhile, plastered on the front pages of a national newspaper is a letter from the murderer specifically addressed to Dr. Frank Clevenger, challenging him to heal him only through letters. Even though the FBI has fingerprints galore from both the murders & the letters, the Highway Killer is not known to any law agency.

More than anything Psychopath is about people who are parents & what they do to their children, especially their sons. About violent, weak & unpredictable parents, & the conflict between doing good & being bad.

Author Keith Ablow lets us into the mind & the dreadful deeds of chameleon Dr. Jonah Wren, a charismatic psychiatrist who works as a temp all over the nation -- six weeks is the maximum he will stay anywhere. He is so empathetic with his disturbed child patients that everywhere he goes, clinicians consider him a miracle worker.

If you have ever wondered how the traumas in our childhood can manifest in our present; how today's stresses can inflame the unhealed wounds of yesterday, & how to think things through & face down the dragon, then Psychopath will be an interesting & eye-opening read. It's exciting too!

Well done! Keith Ablow, a forensic psychiatrist himself, is becoming an accomplished author who has some fierce & fascinating stories to tell.

More from Keith Ablow:
Compulsion
Without Mercy
Denial
Projection
(09/14/03)

Rebecca