The Delilah Case Review

Another month and another book to review from our monthly book club. The book for May was The Delilah Case by Mickie Turk. 

The book starts with a death. Dominique Doucette is dead and now we have to find out why. We go back a few weeks to the beginning of a grand experiment: can six hardened criminals, convicted murders and sociopaths, live in a minimum security "prison" and undergo a drastic transformation with a brand new therapy meant to reshape the human mind? Dr. Dominique Doucette plans to find out. One of the nation's, if not the world's, most famous and lauded psychologists, Dominique plans to show the world that her revolutionary Desire Therapy is the wave of the future for reform and treatment of severely dangerous persons. She and her associates start the House of Mithras, an old plantation house turned into a minimum security prison, the first of its kind in the nation, in the outskirts of Dominique's hometown of New Orleans. But not everyone is so sure about having a group of convicted killers in their backyard. Protesters and friction from local law enforcement may derail the project before it even gets off the ground. Is that why Dominique is dead now?

We delve deep into the dark parts of New Orleans, as well as the dark recesses of the minds of the six appointed criminals. Even Dominique herself. She, too, has demons to hide and vanquish. Will she be able to keep her secrets at bay long enough to have some success with House of Mithras? Through the course of the book, we see the complex relationships in Dominique's live: her overbearing mother who pushed her to success at a young age, her old friend Darrnel who stood by her side through hell and back, a powerful voodoo priestess who is able to calm Dominique's darkness, and the convicts themselves give us a glimpse into the mind of evil. 

The story itself is an intense mystery that sends you on twists and turns as you work through the events leading up to Dominique's death. On more than one occasion I had thought I'd figured out "whodunnit" only to be proven wrong. It was a slow burn, building on itself and the layers of mystery and stories as they entwined. The story building, world building, and tension building of the author is finely done; however, the ending lost me and ultimately tainted the beginning of the book. Some major plot points, as well as the climatic ending seemed slap-dash, thrown together at the last moment, or as if the author forgot that she knew how things all tied together and hadn't bothered to put in larger breadcrumbs throughout the rest of the book. Such important pieces to the puzzle, such big revelations that left me with my mouth open when they were revealed... felt very sudden and my book group had the same reaction of "WTH? How'd she know that? When did she figure THAT out?" when we discussed the ending.

On my scale of 1 (literary hari kari) to 10 (literary orgasmic bliss), I give this book a 6. I almost went lower to a 5.5 because of the ending, but that wouldn't be fair to the beginning 7/8 of the book. I wanted to give it a higher ranking of 7, maybe even an 8, but the ending, the randomness of the big reveal and the hurried pacing of the last 5 chapters just left me... feeling rather "eh" about the whole thing. I do recommend you check it out if you're looking for something to read, but be prepared for the ending.