The Executor: A Thriller

by Jesse Kellerman

Overview

Joseph Geist takes a job as a "conversationalist" for a wealthy, enigmatic woman who offers him a place to stay in her big, beautiful house. But as his friendship with his employer evolves from conversationalist to lodger to caretaker, Joseph finds himself at odds with the woman's troubled nephew, and decides to do whatever is necessary to maintain his position.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781101186152
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	04/01/2010
Sold by:	Penguin Group
Format:	eBook
Pages:	416
Sales rank:	1,040,860
File size:	503 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Jesse Kellerman is the author of Potboiler, The Executor, The Genius, Trouble, Sunstroke. and with Jonathan Kellerman, The Golem of Hollywood. His books and plays have won several awards and an Edgar Award nomination. He lives in California.

Editorial Reviews

…deliciously doom-laden…The fun of reading Kellerman's novel…arises not from the shock of the inevitable (murder, most foul!), but from the clever twists and turns that lead readers up to and away from the climactic moment…Geist's lively and erudite narration is a pleasure to be misled by.
—The Washington Post

Maureen Corrigan

There are eerie echoes of Barbara Vine in The Executor, Jesse Kellerman's stunning novel of psychological suspense: the clinical dissection of a mind that refuses to examine itself; the disintegration of moral boundaries when such a mind develops a fixation; the macabre humor of people who think too much; and, most unnerving, a certain playful cruelty about matters of life and death.
—The New York Times

Marilyn Stasio

At the start of this outstanding novel of psychological suspense, Kellerman's fourth (after The Genius), 30-year-old philosophy grad student Joseph Geist finds himself at loose ends after being suspended from Harvard (for failing to do any work) and breaking up with his longtime girlfriend. When Geist answers an ad in the Harvard Crimson seeking a serious “conversationalist,” he ends up being paid to debate free will for a few hours a day with Alma Spielmann, an elderly woman of Viennese origin. After the two bond, Spielmann offers Geist free room and board at her Cambridge house, where she lives alone. The sudden appearance of Spielmann's difficult nephew, who relies on Spielmann's financial support, threatens Geist's comfortable relationship with his benefactor. The plot builds to a climax that's as devastating as it is plausible. Few thriller writers today are as gifted as Kellerman at using lucid and evocative prose in the service of an intense and nail-biting story. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

So here's the setup: Joseph, a Harvard philosophy graduate student, has just been kicked out by his girlfriend and needs a job and a place to live. He responds to an ad for a "conversationalist" and is hired by enigmatic octogenarian Alma, who was a philosophy student herself decades earlier in Austria. Then Joseph moves in. It's a charmed life, briefly, until Alma dies and he reaches a moral crossroads. There's her drug-addled nephew to contend with, and a couple of curious police officers wondering about the circumstances of Alma's death. Violence ensues, and from then on, it's pure torture for Joseph and the reader, really. VERDICT The buildup is excruciatingly slow—think bad Dostoyevsky—and the protagonist so unsympathetic that it's difficult to care about his quandaries. Kellerman incorporates clever and classic elements, but his fourth novel (after The Genius) would have sufficed as a taut short story of psychological suspense. This is only for those intrigued by philosophical questions and moral debates. Anticipate some demand from the literary thriller set but hope for a more energetic pace with his next title. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 12/09.]—Teresa L. Jacobsen, Solano Cty. Lib, Fairfield, CA

Library Journal