(This article may contain spoilers for TWISTED by Jonathan Kellerman. Or maybe not. In any case, if you plan on reading the book, read on at your own risk. Or skip.)

I finished a book by Jonathan Kellerman called TWISTED last night. Kellerman is, of course, best known for his Alex Delaware series. (I’d love to see Delaware on the big or small screen!) This one, however, is NOT a Delaware novel; instead, it features Petra Connor.

Petra Connor was, if I recall correctly, first introduced in a Delaware novel, but soon merited a book of her own. (I could research it and find out what the title was, exactly, but it’s not really important to this article, and I’m kind of lazy, so I’ll leave it there. Plus my internet is down as I write this, so we’ll just move on.) Kellerman writes crime thrillers in his clipped urgent style, always from the perspective of the detectives. He’s one of my favorites.

So. Onto the book. In this story, Petra is dealing with a lot of stuff. She has a boyfriend who was a cop but is now working with some sort of anti-terrorist unit in Tel Aviv. (The book was written in 2004, so remember that the story is informed by the events of that time, not ours.) Petra catches a case where some kids were gunned down in what appears to be a random gangland shooting after a concert. As they work the case, they find that all victims are identified except for one.

Petra is also assigned to ‘babysit’ a doctoral candidate named Isaac Gomez, who is a young genius, aged 22, already accepted into medical school but is deferring in order to earn a Ph.D. degree. His thesis is something to do with crime statistics, and in his research at the department, he has stumbled across some unsolved cold cases that seem to be related by an odd fact: they all occurred on June 28th. He brings this to Petra and she writes it off initially as insignificant. But as Isaac continues to look at the details of the cases, other patterns, including the wounds themselves, emerge, and Isaac convinces Petra that they have a serial killer on their hands.

So both investigations proceed, one official with departmental sanctions, and the other unofficial, off the books, because no one would think much of it. Petra can’t tell her higher-ups because they wouldn’t allow her to spend time on it, and also because her captain dislikes her intensely.

Okay, so how is this horror? Or maybe the question should be, is it horror at all?

Up until now, what I’ve written is just an extended blurb. A summary that doesn’t give away too much. It’s the setup of the book. Now I have to get into the spoilers. So don’t read on if you don’t want to know more.

I say it is, of course. There’s a serial killer. He’s bashing his victims’ skulls in. There doesn’t appear to be a pattern, except for the date and the weapon used. No connections between any of the victims. That’s a classic serial killer horror story.

Later young Isaac, with the help of a librarian who he gets interested in the case (among other things), finds a copy of a rare old antiquarian journal, handwritten many years before by a serial killer, describing his career meticulously, prior to being caught. It contains graphic descriptions and sketches of the victims whose lives this killer, whose name is Otto Retzik, claimed.

Retzik was born on July 28th. His first killing was on his birthday. And this information will help them solve the case.

As I read the book, I thought, what’s the difference between this story and something like HOLLY by Stephen King? My answer is, not much. What’s the difference between this and something like SILENCE OF THE LAMBS by Thomas Harris? Again, not much. Kellerman’s style is more clipped, more thriller than horror. But in all of these, the point of view characters are the detectives and the detective surrogates. Holly Gibney and Clarice Starling have a lot in common with Petra Connor, and maybe even more in common with Isaac Gomez, who isn’t the main character, but becomes a point of view character many times throughout the book.

How does it differ from my own books? RECIPROCAL EVIL is about a supernatural serial killer, Theodore Tremaine, who kills in order to be rewarded by his evil Masters. And the point of view character, Chris Jones, is a victim in the sense that all of Tremaine’s victims seem to surround Jones and have some connection to the young student. Chris has to investigate and figure things out as the story progresses. Maybe he’s the surrogate detective in this one?

I consider RECIPROCAL EVIL to be pure serial killer horror, with elements of a crime thriller. But is it different than TWISTED in kind, or simply in degree?

I don’t know for sure what other opinions would state, but my own is that TWISTED, by Jonathan Kellerman, is absolutely a horror novel, in the same way that SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, HOLLY, and my own RECIPROCAL EVIL are horror novels.

Thanks for reading. If you have an opinion on this, I’d love to hear it in the comments!