Trouble

From Publishers WeeklyStarred Review. Kellerman, the son of bestsellers Faye and Jonathan Kellerman, shows that his impressive debut, Sunstroke, was no fluke with this gripping psychological page-turner that echoes the best of Hitchcock. Jonah Stem, a young medical resident at St. Agatha's, a midtown Manhattan teaching hospital, heroically intervenes when he encounters an attractive woman desperately fleeing a knife-wielding assailant early one morning on a street near Times Square. After Stem kills the man in self-defense, he enjoys a brief celebrity, but his life soon becomes complicated when the woman he rescued, Eve Gones, seeks him out and the two begin a frenzied affair. Taken aback by Gones's masochism, Stem attempts to end the relationship, but soon finds himself stalked relentlessly. Kellerman artfully conveys Stem's descent into near madness, making the step-by-step degradation of a decent man who was in the wrong place at the wrong time plausible and chilling. Author tour. (Jan.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. ReviewTrouble opens like a Scrubs episode-you can easily imagine Zach Braff as medical student Jonah Stem, wandering Times Square at 2 a.m., his shoes squishy with, uh, emergency-room detritus following a rough night on call.... But like Scrubs, in the end Trouble is a satisfying journey into the bizarre. 3 1/2 out of 4 stars -- _People_, February 5, 2007 After a relatively cheery debut, the talented Kellerman (_Sunstroke_, 2005) travels to Ruth Rendell country, and the bet here is you won't have read a more nightmarish novel all year. -- _Kirkus Reviews_, December 1, 2006