With Rage Therapy, Vancouver ER physician-turned-author Daniel Kalla has delivered a credible and satisfying thriller. In the tradition of other gifted moonlighters (Kathy Reichs, John Grisham, Patricia Cornwell, etc.), Kalla successfully blends an inventive story with intimate, detailed insight into the medical profession, giving flesh to the plot skeletons often so disappointingly evident in much genre fiction.

Joel Ashman is a Seattle psychiatrist who is occasionally called upon to pinch-hit for Seattle Homicide as a psychological profiler, illuminating the behaviour of disturbed minds. Here, his expertise is required to help solve the murder and mutilation of another high-profile psychiatrist, Stanley Kolberg, Ashman’s own ex-partner and mentor and a specialist in “rage therapy,” which seeks to control impulsive acts committed in a state of consuming anger. Kolberg’s murder and its investigation, lost patients, and buried truths from Ashman’s own past drive the hunt for the killer toward a satisfying conclusion, delivering all of the must-haves: twists, romance, and glimpses of human depravity.

Kalla’s comfort with his subject and the interesting use of the files of a former patient (an apparent suicide who fairly haunts the narrative through his case history) compensate for his reliance on some of the genre’s more stock characters – the wacky pathologist, the tough-as-nails homicide sergeant with a heart of gold, the protagonist haunted by a past trauma – giving this, his third novel, a gratifying cohesion.