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Probe #1
Probe
When a beautiful, emaciated woman is found on a remote cliff, completely naked and apparently lacking all memory of who she is, psychoanalyst Kevin Blake is assigned to the case and becomes obsessed with unlocking her memory. Reprint.
384 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published January 1, 1985
77 people want to read
About the author
Carole Nelson Douglas
167 books567 followersCarole Nelson Douglas is the author of sixty-four award-winning novels in contemporary and historical mystery/suspense and romance, high and urban fantasy and science fiction genres. She is best known for two popular mystery series, the Irene Adler Sherlockian historical suspense series (she was the first woman to spin-off a series from the Holmes stories) and the multi-award-winning alphabetically titled Midnight Louie contemporary mystery series. From Cat in an Alphabet Soup #1 to Cat in an Alphabet Endgame #28.
Delilah Street, PI (Paranormal Investigator), headlines Carole's noir Urban Fantasy series: Dancing With Werewolves, Brimstone Kiss, Vampire Sunrise, Silver Zombie, and Virtual Virgin. Now Delilah has moved from her paranormal Vegas to Midnight Louie, feline PI's "Slightly surreal" Vegas to solve crimes in the first book of the new Cafe Noir series, Absinthe Without Leave. Next in 2020, Brandi Alexander on the Rocks.
Once Upon a Midnight Noir is out in eBook and trade paperback versions. This author-designed and illustrated collection of three mystery stories with a paranormal twist and a touch of romance features two award-winning stories featuring Midnight Louie, feline PI and Delilah Street, Paranormal Investigator in a supernatural-run Las Vegas. A third story completes the last unfinished story fragment of Edgar Allan Poe, as a Midnight Louie Past Life adventure set in 1790 Norland on a isolated island lighthouse. Louie is a soldier of fortune, a la Puss in Boots.
Next out are Midnight Louie's Cat in an Alphabet Endgame in hardcover, trade paperback and eBook Aug. 23, 2016.
All the Irene Adler novels, the first to feature a woman from the Sherlock Holmes Canon as a crime solver, are now available in eBook.
Carole was a college theater and English literature major. She was accepted for grad school in Theater at the University of Minnesota and Northwestern University, and could have worked as an editorial assistant at Vogue magazine (a la The Devil Wears Prada) but wanted a job closer to home. She worked as a newspaper reporter and then editor in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. During her time there, she discovered a long, expensive classified advertisement offering a black cat named Midnight Louey to the "right" home for one dollar and wrote a feature story on the plucky survival artist, putting it into the cat's point of view. The cat found a country home, but its name was revived for her feline PI mystery series many years later. Some of the Midnight Louie series entries include the dedication "For the real and original Midnight Louie. Nine lives were not enough." Midnight Louie has now had 32 novelistic lives and features in several short stories as well.
Hollywood and Broadway director, playwright, screenwriter and novelist Garson Kanin took Carole's first novel to his publisher on the basis of an interview/article she'd done with him five years earlier. "My friend Phil Silvers," he wrote, "would say he'd never won an interview yet, but he had never had the luck of you."
Carole is a "literary chameleon" who's had novels published in many genres, and often mixes such genre elements as mystery and suspense, fantasy and science fiction, romance with mainstream issues, especially the roles of women.
Delilah Street, PI (Paranormal Investigator), headlines Carole's noir Urban Fantasy series: Dancing With Werewolves, Brimstone Kiss, Vampire Sunrise, Silver Zombie, and Virtual Virgin. Now Delilah has moved from her paranormal Vegas to Midnight Louie, feline PI's "Slightly surreal" Vegas to solve crimes in the first book of the new Cafe Noir series, Absinthe Without Leave. Next in 2020, Brandi Alexander on the Rocks.
Once Upon a Midnight Noir is out in eBook and trade paperback versions. This author-designed and illustrated collection of three mystery stories with a paranormal twist and a touch of romance features two award-winning stories featuring Midnight Louie, feline PI and Delilah Street, Paranormal Investigator in a supernatural-run Las Vegas. A third story completes the last unfinished story fragment of Edgar Allan Poe, as a Midnight Louie Past Life adventure set in 1790 Norland on a isolated island lighthouse. Louie is a soldier of fortune, a la Puss in Boots.
Next out are Midnight Louie's Cat in an Alphabet Endgame in hardcover, trade paperback and eBook Aug. 23, 2016.
All the Irene Adler novels, the first to feature a woman from the Sherlock Holmes Canon as a crime solver, are now available in eBook.
Carole was a college theater and English literature major. She was accepted for grad school in Theater at the University of Minnesota and Northwestern University, and could have worked as an editorial assistant at Vogue magazine (a la The Devil Wears Prada) but wanted a job closer to home. She worked as a newspaper reporter and then editor in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. During her time there, she discovered a long, expensive classified advertisement offering a black cat named Midnight Louey to the "right" home for one dollar and wrote a feature story on the plucky survival artist, putting it into the cat's point of view. The cat found a country home, but its name was revived for her feline PI mystery series many years later. Some of the Midnight Louie series entries include the dedication "For the real and original Midnight Louie. Nine lives were not enough." Midnight Louie has now had 32 novelistic lives and features in several short stories as well.
Hollywood and Broadway director, playwright, screenwriter and novelist Garson Kanin took Carole's first novel to his publisher on the basis of an interview/article she'd done with him five years earlier. "My friend Phil Silvers," he wrote, "would say he'd never won an interview yet, but he had never had the luck of you."
Carole is a "literary chameleon" who's had novels published in many genres, and often mixes such genre elements as mystery and suspense, fantasy and science fiction, romance with mainstream issues, especially the roles of women.
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
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July 9, 20212 stars, and I'm being generous.
If you insist on reading this, you can skip the terribly uneventful middle 80% and miss almost nothing of importance.
If I have to say something nice: the first 10% was pretty good (3+ stars), and the concept had great potential.
If you insist on reading this, you can skip the terribly uneventful middle 80% and miss almost nothing of importance.
If I have to say something nice: the first 10% was pretty good (3+ stars), and the concept had great potential.
July 8, 2008
Interesting psychiatric science fiction story with some interesting concepts. Decently written but not real gripping,
November 30, 2024
Found this in an old box of books from high school. Exactly what you'd expect given the cover and description.
November 9, 2025
Ordinarily, I wouldn't have touched a book with a cover like this. But the sequel's cover art caught my eye, so here I am. For some reason, reviewers here tend to think poorly of the writing, but that's extremely odd because it's the only thing this book has going for it. This is the kind of writing I long to see when I open a book, but am all too often denied. Some of the descriptive metaphors and similes here are top-notch. There's also a bit of intelligent humor thrown in. The story isn't the best, however, and I dislike Kevin.
"The car was bouncing—a small, bright ball—down into the darkness. Kellehay wondered what words to what song he should sing as it touched earth each time, then rebounded on to the next note. . . ." [Chef's kiss.]
-
"And then he read it in her face, an expression not exotic, but deeper than he'd ever seen it on any human face, even his own. Sheer aloneness. Dumb, terrifying outsideness. An alienation that he expected to see in the eyes of a denizen of the Third World, or the red-neck at the next table in a Denny's Restaurant, or in the dead gaze of a paranoid schizophrenic. Or an overbright child. Or the mirror."
-
"... he said nothing and watched her walk into what he had once considered the impregnable safety of Willhelm. The brick looked like cardboard now, that any strong wind could blow over, and there was a wolf at the venerable wooden door. Maybe its name was Zyunsinth. Maybe it was Kevin."
-
"Snow flew thicker; the flakes careened soundlessly into the windshield and danced like mad albino mosquitoes in the headlights as he pulled the knob."
-
"He and Jane were plunged from level, predictable road to a surface that bumped and ground its way under a low, dark gantlet of whipping branches. The steering wheel veered sharply, arbitrary as a ouija board."
-
"... he lumbered back to the van, ignoring the headache that sponsored a light show in his skull."
I hate psychiatry in general, but the worst kind of shrink is the one that gets "romantically" involved with their patient; it's disgusting. Kevin becomes possessive of Jane even before seeing her for the first time. And what is up with her being called "his Baby Jane Doe?" It's downright creepy. Jane was a halfway decent character. But she arrived as a blank slate, so the whole situation isn't fair for her. And Kevin is supposed to be this miracle doctor who can cure the most hopeless of cases, but throughout the book, he comes off as incompetent and unprofessional. Adding some side patients to the story would have made things a little more believable. But the only patient shown is Jane, and his sessions with her are either "fade-to-black" or brief and unproductive.
...
The author makes quite a few biblical references in this novel. Some common misconceptions are inevitably present. It's always frustrating/distracting when misinformation like this crops up:
"... like Bethlehem on a Christmas card, under an overarching skyful of sharply luminous stars. Not one of them looked to Kevin like a guiding light from a benign heavenly visitor." There are many things wrong with "nativity" scenes (and, of course, "Christmas"). Most relevant here, though, is the fact that the guiding "star" was anything but "benign." After all, this "star" was ultimately responsible for the death of every boy two years of age and under in Bethlehem. Satan was likely the one guiding the astrologers; a futile attempt to indirectly snuff out Jesus as a young child, by leading them first to Herod, then to Jesus. Like an arrow-shaped road sign out of a cartoon, spelling out with flashing colored bulbs: "THIS WAY TO KING OF THE JEWS."
-
"... feeling oddly like Adam escorting Eve from Eden, only neither of them had taken the apple. Behind them the light narrowed until it blazed like a flaming sword." The tree of the knowledge of good and bad was simply not an apple tree. Painters and Milton are to blame for that one.
...
Vocabulary:
Like many authors, she falls into the habit of using the "-selves" when it isn't necessary, thereby overusing them. (I don't know about you, but I don't want to see "himself/herself" three times in a single paragraph.) Some other words she makes unnecessary use of are: "probe" (I know it's the title, but she takes it too far), "naked," "literal," "perch," "belt," and "flare." And characters "lace their fingers/hands" too often.
-
"himself": 93
"herself": 47
"itself": 23
"yourself": 15
"themselves": 11
"myself": 6
"oneself": 1
"here and there": 2 (+1 "[this] here, [that] there")
"loom" (verb): 6 (Used twice on p. 174!)
"ponderous": 3
"to and fro": at least 4
"lay": 32
"grin": 25
"glance": 56
"glow": 12
"gleam": 8
"dim": 12
"Three stories of rear decking made the building loom with a ramshackle resemblance to the slum it had been not many years past." (p. 174)
-
"A shadow loomed from the side of the building, from the edge of his vision." (Also p. 174!)
...
Letting breath out:
"He let out the breath he'd been holding..."
-
"Kevin finally expelled the breath caught when he'd figured himself about to be mugged and murdered, the breath he'd misered deep in his diaphragm while all his questions rode on shallow bursts of air."
-
"He let his breath out carefully, so she wouldn't catch his emotional tenor."
Halo/Frame:
"... it haloed her against the dimness."
-
"Her hair was a halo..."
-
"His palms framed her face..."
...
Typos/Grammar Crimes:
"I wish I hadn't of said stop at McDonald's and we can stay ten-seven on air; I wish we'd of gone and eaten at the damn greasy spoon on Main Street. . . . Someone else would've gotten it—the call." (Hadn't have and we'd have. There is no "of.") I just can't understand what twisted logic is behind authors doing this. Especially when the same character uses both the incorrect "of" and the correct "-'ve" (as in "would've"). It usually happens with uneducated characters, but Kellehay, here, supposedly has a college education.
-
"We couldn't of asked for a better daughter." (Again, it's couldn't have...)
-
"Kevir" (Kevin)
-
"So natural that she'd be took sudden in the night." (taken)
-
"When we're really close to someone, I think we know—sometimes how'd they react." (how they'd)
...
6/10
"The car was bouncing—a small, bright ball—down into the darkness. Kellehay wondered what words to what song he should sing as it touched earth each time, then rebounded on to the next note. . . ." [Chef's kiss.]
-
"And then he read it in her face, an expression not exotic, but deeper than he'd ever seen it on any human face, even his own. Sheer aloneness. Dumb, terrifying outsideness. An alienation that he expected to see in the eyes of a denizen of the Third World, or the red-neck at the next table in a Denny's Restaurant, or in the dead gaze of a paranoid schizophrenic. Or an overbright child. Or the mirror."
-
"... he said nothing and watched her walk into what he had once considered the impregnable safety of Willhelm. The brick looked like cardboard now, that any strong wind could blow over, and there was a wolf at the venerable wooden door. Maybe its name was Zyunsinth. Maybe it was Kevin."
-
"Snow flew thicker; the flakes careened soundlessly into the windshield and danced like mad albino mosquitoes in the headlights as he pulled the knob."
-
"He and Jane were plunged from level, predictable road to a surface that bumped and ground its way under a low, dark gantlet of whipping branches. The steering wheel veered sharply, arbitrary as a ouija board."
-
"... he lumbered back to the van, ignoring the headache that sponsored a light show in his skull."
I hate psychiatry in general, but the worst kind of shrink is the one that gets "romantically" involved with their patient; it's disgusting. Kevin becomes possessive of Jane even before seeing her for the first time. And what is up with her being called "his Baby Jane Doe?" It's downright creepy. Jane was a halfway decent character. But she arrived as a blank slate, so the whole situation isn't fair for her. And Kevin is supposed to be this miracle doctor who can cure the most hopeless of cases, but throughout the book, he comes off as incompetent and unprofessional. Adding some side patients to the story would have made things a little more believable. But the only patient shown is Jane, and his sessions with her are either "fade-to-black" or brief and unproductive.
...
The author makes quite a few biblical references in this novel. Some common misconceptions are inevitably present. It's always frustrating/distracting when misinformation like this crops up:
"... like Bethlehem on a Christmas card, under an overarching skyful of sharply luminous stars. Not one of them looked to Kevin like a guiding light from a benign heavenly visitor." There are many things wrong with "nativity" scenes (and, of course, "Christmas"). Most relevant here, though, is the fact that the guiding "star" was anything but "benign." After all, this "star" was ultimately responsible for the death of every boy two years of age and under in Bethlehem. Satan was likely the one guiding the astrologers; a futile attempt to indirectly snuff out Jesus as a young child, by leading them first to Herod, then to Jesus. Like an arrow-shaped road sign out of a cartoon, spelling out with flashing colored bulbs: "THIS WAY TO KING OF THE JEWS."
-
"... feeling oddly like Adam escorting Eve from Eden, only neither of them had taken the apple. Behind them the light narrowed until it blazed like a flaming sword." The tree of the knowledge of good and bad was simply not an apple tree. Painters and Milton are to blame for that one.
...
Vocabulary:
Like many authors, she falls into the habit of using the "-selves" when it isn't necessary, thereby overusing them. (I don't know about you, but I don't want to see "himself/herself" three times in a single paragraph.) Some other words she makes unnecessary use of are: "probe" (I know it's the title, but she takes it too far), "naked," "literal," "perch," "belt," and "flare." And characters "lace their fingers/hands" too often.
-
"himself": 93
"herself": 47
"itself": 23
"yourself": 15
"themselves": 11
"myself": 6
"oneself": 1
"here and there": 2 (+1 "[this] here, [that] there")
"loom" (verb): 6 (Used twice on p. 174!)
"ponderous": 3
"to and fro": at least 4
"lay": 32
"grin": 25
"glance": 56
"glow": 12
"gleam": 8
"dim": 12
"Three stories of rear decking made the building loom with a ramshackle resemblance to the slum it had been not many years past." (p. 174)
-
"A shadow loomed from the side of the building, from the edge of his vision." (Also p. 174!)
...
Letting breath out:
"He let out the breath he'd been holding..."
-
"Kevin finally expelled the breath caught when he'd figured himself about to be mugged and murdered, the breath he'd misered deep in his diaphragm while all his questions rode on shallow bursts of air."
-
"He let his breath out carefully, so she wouldn't catch his emotional tenor."
Halo/Frame:
"... it haloed her against the dimness."
-
"Her hair was a halo..."
-
"His palms framed her face..."
...
Typos/Grammar Crimes:
"I wish I hadn't of said stop at McDonald's and we can stay ten-seven on air; I wish we'd of gone and eaten at the damn greasy spoon on Main Street. . . . Someone else would've gotten it—the call." (Hadn't have and we'd have. There is no "of.") I just can't understand what twisted logic is behind authors doing this. Especially when the same character uses both the incorrect "of" and the correct "-'ve" (as in "would've"). It usually happens with uneducated characters, but Kellehay, here, supposedly has a college education.
-
"We couldn't of asked for a better daughter." (Again, it's couldn't have...)
-
"Kevir" (Kevin)
-
"So natural that she'd be took sudden in the night." (taken)
-
"When we're really close to someone, I think we know—sometimes how'd they react." (how they'd)
...
6/10
August 9, 2025
A naked woman is found on the bluffs in the cold. Police come to investigate and one of them is literally blown away. The first thing the woman remembers is the ambulance ride to the hospital with nothing before that. Kevin Blake is the psychiatrist assigned to the case. It appears that the woman has special powers that protect her and the govenment is interested. Most of the story is Kevin's attempt to find the Jane Doe's origins. Then it takes a fantasical turn as the woman's origin is revealed.
April 23, 2020
Not a bad book, kind of an interesting idea, but just didn't really grab my interest and hold it. And now I see there's a sequel...guess I'd buy it if I saw it, but not sure I'll look too hard.
January 4, 2021
Excellent. Weird. Highly recommend.
October 12, 2023
Well, that was awful. It's been a while since I've read something, gotten about halfway through and wondered why I was reading it. This unfortunately contains a lot of things I hate, all smushed together. Betrayal of professional ethics, glorification of alcoholism, one-night stands, the weaponization of sex, abandonment of pets, an awkward emphasis on cherries; really, the list goes on and on. Generally, these literary sins are considered to be committed solely in the male domain, but Douglas manages to out-chauvinist many of the male fantasy authors I've read. While she does scrape together some respectability for Kevin by the end of the novel, for me, it wasn't enough.
March 31, 2011
You Kevin Me Jane slow psychological UFO story
June 19, 2015
Got as far as pg 67 and just couldn't read it anymore. Really boring.
June 28, 2016
I didn't care too much for this book. The underlying story was good, but it was long and drawn out. The writing style and unusual words made it tedious to read.
August 7, 2016
I did enjoy this story. It was not really well-written, and it was predictable. However, it did keep me interested, for the most part.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews