The Analyst - John Katzenbach

   2002; 501 pages.  New Author? : Yes.  Genre: Psychological Thriller.  Overall Rating : 9*/10.

 

    Happy 53^rd birthday, Doctor.  Welcome to the first day of your death.

 

    Well, that’s a heckuva opening sentence of an anonymous letter, delivered last thing in his workday, to Dr. Frederick “Ricky” Starks, one of New York City’s foremost psychoanalysts.  The rest of the message is even worse.

 

    The letter is signed “RUMPLESTILTSKIN”, an obvious pseudonym, and announces the start of a bizarre game.  Ricky has fifteen days to discover Mr. R’s real identity, and can also ask three questions via classified ads placed in the New York Times, as kind of a bonus.

 

    If Ricky succeeds, he goes free.  If he doesn’t, Rumplestiltskin will start killing 52 of Ricky’s unsuspecting relatives.  The letter lists their names, so that Ricky may know that Rumplestiltskin has done his homework.  And there is an out.  At any point. Ricky can kill himself and the slaying of his relatives will stop.

 

    It all sounds like the doing of one of Ricky’s disgruntled patients, right?  One with a psychopathic streak in him.  Probably venting some pent-up anger, that’s all.  But shortly after receiving the letter, one of Ricky’s patients gets pushed in front of a speeding subway train, with body-splattering results, so it’s time to take the threat seriously.

 

    Better sharpen up those psychoanalyst skills of yours, Ricky.  Because the clock's ticking and you’ve got two weeks to win the game.

 

What’s To Like...

    The Analyst is a psychological thriller and is divided into three parts, namely:

        Part 1: The Unwelcome Letter  (pg.1)

        Part 2: The Man Who Never Was  (pg. 273)

        Part 3: Even Bad Poets Love Death  (pg. 375)

    I’d paraphrase them as “Ricky Reacts”; “Ricky Acts”, and “Ricky Attacks”.

 

    I loved the character development of our protagonist/analyst.  At the start he’s somewhat smug, confident in his mental acumen that comes from lots of schooling and years as a psychoanalyst.  He quickly discovers that Rumplestiltskin, and his two accomplices Merlin and Virgil, are every bit his match when it comes to playing mind games, and he’s forced to develop new survival skills.

 

    The book is written in the third-person POV, but we essentially tag along with Ricky as he tries to figure out who Rumplestilstkin is, which of the various secondary characters are working with him, and whether the deaths of a couple of those are real or merely staged to unnerve Ricky.

 

    Along the way we learn the secret to winning at chess (if only it was that simple!), how to play the game of “Foxes and Hounds”, pick up a smattering of French (while visiting an exotic location), and how to create a new identity for oneself (not nearly as easy as you’d think).  Since the book was published in 2002, public telephone booths are still around, and you can obtain something that's called an “electronic mail address”.  AOL and Yahoo exist, but not MySpace or Facebook.

 

    The ending is full of tension, psychologically intriguing, and with a couple twists that I didn’t foresee.  All the main plot threads are tied up, and even though we never learn Rumplestiltskin’s real name, we do get to understand why he hates Ricky so much.  The Analyst is a standalone novel, but has room for a sequel, which does in fact exist (The Analyst 2, published in 2018), but unfortunately is only available in Spanish at this time.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon:  4.5/5 based on 426 ratings.

    Goodreads: 4.13/5 based on 40,367 ratings and 2,983 reviews

 

 

Excerpts...

    “All right,” Ricky said.  “You keep talking about this game.  Well, it is not a game to Mr. Zimmerman.  He has been in analysis for slightly less than a year, and his treatment is at an important stage.  You and your employer, the mysterious Mr. R., can screw around with me.  That’s one thing.  But it is altogether something different when you involve my patients.  That crosses a boundary…”

    The young woman called Virgil held up her hand.  “Ricky, try not to sound so pompous.”  (pg. 40)

 

    “I believe I have only a single week to live,” he said.

    Dr. Lewis’s eyebrows arched upward.

    “You are ill, Ricky?”

    Ricky shook his head.

    “I think I must murder myself,” he answered.

    The old analyst leaned forward.  “That is a problem,” he said.  (pg. 171)

 

It was the most deadly of races.  A ghost pursuing a dead man.  A dead man hunting a ghost.  (pg. 419)

    There’s not much to quibble about.  There’s a fair amount of cussing, as you’d expect in a psychological thriller, but it didn’t feel overdone.

 

    Part One of the story dragged a bit for me, as Ricky reels from one Rumplestiltskin-induced disaster in his life to the next.  At times I wanted to shake Ricky and tell him to wise up, which he does in Part Two, whereupon the excitement and pace pick up nicely and the book becomes a page-turner.

 

    The overall plotline was well-conceived, John Katzenbach’s writing is superb, and everything builds nicely to a satisfying climax.  Learn from Ricky’s mistakes: instead of trying to figure out who Rumplestiltskin is, focus on how the various other characters might fit into his diabolical scheme.

 

    I don’t read a lot of Psychological Thrillers, but if I find a few more as good as The Analyst, I could easily be motivated to investigate this genre further.

 

    9 Stars.  John Katzenbach is the son of former US Attorney General (during the Lyndon Johnson administration) Nicholas Katzenbach.  I frankly had never heard of this author before reading The Analyst, and for some reason his works seem to be much more popular in Mexico than here.  But if you've heard of or seen the 2002 movie Hart’s War, starring Bruce Willis, guess what?  It’s based on a book of the same title written by John Katzenbach.