The Golem of Paris

by Jonathan Kellerman, Jesse Kellerman

Overview

From two #1 bestselling masters of crime fiction comes an extraordinary thriller about family, murder, and secrets.
 
It’s been more than a year since LAPD detective Jacob Lev learned the remarkable truth about his family, and he’s not coping well. He’s back to drinking, the LAPD Special Projects Department continues to shadow him, and the memory of a woman named Mai haunts him. And while Jacob has tried to build a bridge to his mother, she remains imprisoned inside her own tattered mind. Then he comes across the file for a gruesome unsolved murder that brings the two halves of his life into startling collision. Finding the killer will take him halfway around the world, to Paris. It’s a dangerous search for truth that plunges him into the past. And for Jacob Lev, there is no place more frightening.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780515156089
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	09/06/2016
Series:	Jacob Lev Series , #2
Pages:	528
Sales rank:	522,155
Product dimensions:	4.20(w) x 7.50(h) x 1.20(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Jonathan Kellerman is one of the world’s most popular authors, with more than three dozen New York Times–bestselling crime novels, most recently Motive and The Murderer’s Daughter. He has won the Goldwyn, Edgar, and Anthony Awards, and has been nominated for the Shamus Award. Jonathan and his wife, bestselling novelist Faye Kellerman, live in California, New Mexico, and New York.
 
Jesse Kellerman won the Princess Grace Award for best young American playwright and is the author of Sunstroke, Trouble, The Genius (for which he won the 2010 Grand Prix des Lectrices de Elle), The Executor, and Potboiler (for which he was nominated for the Edgar Award for Best Novel). He lives in California.

Hometown:

Beverly Hills, California

Date of Birth:

August 9, 1949

Place of Birth:

New York, New York

Education:

B.A. in psychology, University of California-Los Angeles; Ph.D., University of Southern California, 1974

Website:

http://www.jonathankellerman.com/

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One.
(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "The Golem of Paris"
by .
Copyright © 2016 Jonathan Kellerman.
Excerpted by permission of Penguin Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“The Golem of Hollywood transcends genre. It’s a whole that exceeds the sum of its very considerable parts, creative and otherwise . . . a story so wonderfully told that your bookshelf must have it.” —Bookreporter.com
 
“One of the craziest, wildest, and most compelling works of popular fiction in years.”
—Commentary
 
“A witty, propulsive, and frequently chilling read . . . as ambitious as it is entertaining.” —Kirkus Reviews

Reading Group Guide

Reading Guide Questions for The Golem of Paris

1.) When The Golem of Paris opens, Detective Lev refuses to trust the Special Projects division of the LAPD, his father, or his own senses. How does his distrust change over the course of the novel? Is Detective Lev right in his final assessment?

2.) The past—be it cold cases, glimpses into Bina Reich’s painful experiences, ancient lore, or political crises—plays a key role in the events that unfold. Should the characters explore their history or are they allowing themselves to be governed by it?

3.) Though Detective Lev, Mai, and Special Projects may share the same enemies, they are not always on the same team. Who are the heroes and the villains among these crucial figures? Do the main characters always do the right thing?

4.) Detective Lev seems to have varied relationships with the members of Special Projects. What does this say about the group as a whole? Are all of the officers on the same page or do they have different aims in mind? How important is it for a collective to agree on how to arrive at a shared goal?

5.) In the final pages, Mallick says, “I’m not designed to operate in today’s world. None of us are. Media. YouTube… We’re forever scrambling to play catch-up.” Do you think he has a reason to be worried? Is it possible to keep a secret in the modern era?

6.) What is the significance of naming in The Golem of Paris? Bina Reich, for example, changes hers twice in her life.
 

Editorial Reviews

Praise for The Golem of Paris

“A compelling mix of adventure, crime, and horror with paranormal and historical elements. The Golem of Paris is a fascinating and frightening glimpse into an imagined religious supernatural subcult [as well as] an engaging crime-solving tale.”—Kirkus Reviews
 
“A classically constructed detective story featuring the tormented hero of a previous book (The Golem of Hollywood) that morphs into a supernatural thriller combining elements of Jewish legend, religious mysticism, and pagan mythology.”—New York Times Book Review
 
“I don’t know how one might define ‘magic’ in the literary sense, but I can give you an example of it: The Golem of Paris. It is ostensibly a mystery, but it slides across genre boundaries—romance, supernatural, historical, liturgical- and obliterates them. It is a wonderful, haunting tale...Read, wonder, and enjoy for yourself.”—Bookreporter.com

From the Publisher

…a classically constructed detective story…that morphs into a supernatural thriller…it's hard to resist a protagonist who does battle with demonic giants and is in thrall to a woman who's part angel and part bug.

The New York Times Book Review - Marilyn Stasio

09/21/2015
The Kellermans’ uneven sequel to 2014’s The Golem of Hollywood finds Det. Jacob Lev of the LAPD assigned to a clerical job in a remote airplane hangar east of Los Angeles after antagonizing his superiors in his last case. Special Projects, a recently formed group, has Jacob under 24-hour surveillance. In his boredom, Jacob becomes engrossed in the unsolved Marquette case from 2004, in which a mother and her five-year-old son were found shot in the forehead, their bodies in posed positions with their eyelids removed. When Jacob discovers a similar murder previously committed in France, those in charge grudgingly allow him to travel to Paris to investigate. Jacob’s journey to uncover the killer leads him to explore several generations of interlocking family histories throughout Europe. The sophisticated, smart beginning, which interweaves interesting characters from different time frames, compensates only in part for the extended passages of tedious prose that bog down the novel’s second half. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

2015-08-17
Detective Jacob Lev takes on a brutal cold case and discovers that the murder has connections to his mother's murky past, a scary Russian oligarch, and a recent murder in Paris. After his last case (The Golem of Hollywood, 2014, etc.), which had him questioning his sanity and sort-of believing in supernatural monsters of retribution and which landed him in crime-fighting purgatory, Jacob is assigned to archiving cold cases in an industrial warehouse. But one of them, the gruesome 2004 murder of a mother and son, piques his interest, possibly because of his own background—he had long believed his own mother to be dead, but she's now catatonic and living in a health care facility. Investigating the murder leads him to Paris, where a recent crime is an eerie echo of his case, and a Paris investigator seems determined not to see the connection. In pursuing his main suspect, a Russian billionaire, Jacob finds a chilling connection to his mother's past and a fateful trip she made to Czechoslovakia in her youth. Shadowing the investigation and his life are the enigmatic members of the Special Projects team and Mai, who's apparently the mythological golem and yet so much more. Father and son Kellermans continue their co-written Golem series with a fascinating and frightening glimpse into an imagined religious supernatural subculture and the very real brutality and inscrutability of Eastern Bloc secret police networks while also spinning an engaging crime-solving tale and setting up a more distinct Lev family link to the mysterious and unearthly events that will certainly keep popping up as long as Mai is free. A curious yet compelling mix of adventure, crime, and horror with paranormal and historical elements.

Kirkus Reviews