Guilt by Jonathan Kellerman

 It seems as if, as Kellerman continues to write his stories about Alex Delaware and Milo, they turn into more of a police procedural than a thriller. From the moment when a woman discovers the skeleton of an infant, buried in a box in the back yard of the home she has just purchased, Milo and Alex crawl (not leap) into action, interviewing witness after witness, and brainstorm multiple theories about means, motive, and opportunity. It's like there's a contest to see how many red herrings we all get to follow down the path to the inevitable cul de sac, until at last in the final twenty pages or so, all is made clear, the answer revealed. We might begin to get a glimmer of guilt a bit earlier, but it's tough. And yet, if you've followed the duo this far, you know you'll have to hang in there to the bitter end to know how it all turns out.

After the new of the first skeleton leaks out, a possible copycat strikes within days, leaving the bones of another infant, strangely polished, in a local park, and an adult murder victim is found in the park the same night by a jogger. The first infant skeleton is at least fifty years old, while the second seems...fresher...so there really can't be any connection between the two, can there? This is what Alex and Milo have to find out. Alex, as usual, takes on those delicate tasks requiring perhaps a smidgen of con artistry and finesse, while Milo plays the bumbling police detective, and deals with the political pressures within the police department and city government. After all, it might be bad for real estate values of some of the city councilmen's homes if this sort of thing were allowed to go unsolved.

One nice thing about Kellerman's writing is that he spends a great deal of time and effort actually developing minor characters into believable human beings, complete with rational (or irrational) motivations, and complete backstories. You never feel like you're getting a hodgepodge of cardboard cutout characters with Kellerman; that he's really thought about these people a great deal, and cares enough to write the very best.

An interesting set of puzzles, a few kinks and curls on the way to a solution. Worth staying awake late to finish - which I did.

Victims by Jonathan Kellerman

There's really not much about this Alex Delaware novel that makes it all that different from the first twenty six. It is a solid piece of workmanship of the type we have come to expect from Kellerman over the years. No need to introduce us to the characters, we know Milo and Alex and Alex's girlfriend, Robin, and all of the folks down at the precinct well enough to get along and enjoy the mystery.

As per the formula, Alex and Milo split up the work of tracking down and eliminating all the false leads from the latest gruesome murder, when a nasty harridan is gutted in her lonely apartment. No one likes her, not even her sister or her ex-husband, her coworkers all despise her, her shrink found her off putting, and even random strangers she encountered came to loathe her and wish her dead. Plenty of fodder for the red herrings.

Of course, it becomes a bit more complicated when the second body is discovered, murdered and mutilated in the same way. This time it's a man whom everybody loves, no one has an unkind word to whisper to the investigative duo as they flail blindly trying to find either a reason he might have been killed, or some sort of connection with the first victim. Of course, more innocents must die, and the pressure be ratcheted up on Milo and Alex to solve the case, before their first real break comes out of the blue. Once the bloodhounds are pointed in the right direction, things begin to fall into place rapidly, with only a couple of odd plot twists to make it work out in the end.

A good evening's reliable entertainment, but that's all.

Gun Games by Faye Kellerman

I always look forward to a new Decker/Lazarus novel by Kellerman. This novel just moves along steadily, much like an actual police investigation, and inexhorably towards its final destination, without too many surprises along the way, really.

When the mother of a good, but nerdy, student at an exclusive prep school who has committed suicide contacts Decker and asks him to dig deeper into her son's death, she provides just enough justification for him to open the investigation. The family has never had any firearms in the house, and no one knows how the boy, Gregory, got the stolen pistol he used to end his life. All of the physical evidence on the scene confirms that it was a suicide, but Decker agrees to give it a second look.

(By the way, I caught one mistake in this book. The suicide was committed with a pistol - mentioned several times - but when Decker's detectives revisit the scene later, the cleaning crew has already cleaned up the mess from - the shotgun blast. Where did Kellerman paste that bit of text from, I wonder?)

When a second student from the same school, Myra Gelb, also kills herself, and the pistol used turns out also to have been stolen a number of years earlier, Decker and his detectives Marge Dunn and Scott Oliver turn up the heat on the investigation a bit.

In a seemingly unrelated story, we get to follow Decker and Rina's fifteen year old foster son, Gabe, as he readies himself for study at either Harvard or Juilliard next year, and begins to audition for some summer jobs as a pianist. He meets a cute Persian Jewish girl, Yasmine, who is only fourteen, at a coffee shop, and she incites him to go to La Traviata with her, as she has somehow acquired two tickets, and none of her friends or family are really interested in opera - her very strict and traditional father has determined that she will be a doctor someday, and music is just foolishness. Of  course, the two become infatuated with one another, and carry on a texting love affair and clandestine trysts for weeks while Decker is busily investigating teen suicides.

Kellerman walks a fine line, politically speaking, on a couple of issues in this book, giving us some almost contradictory messages.

"Guns are bad, as they contribute to teen suicide."
"Guns are good, as they allow one of our heros to defend himself against a group of attackers."
"Bullying is a huge problem in our schools, and you should always report it to your teachers or principal."
"Teachers and the principal are totally ineffectual in countering bullying, and your best bet is to take matters into your own hands, or make some sort of accomodation with the bullies."

A fast, fun read.

Mystery by Jonathan Kellerman

I've long enjoyed the writings of Jonathan Kellerman, and his wife, Faye. Getting to hang out with Alex Delaware and his pal, Milo, or Peter Decker, is always a rare pleasure. Kellerman continues the usual fun with the latest novel, true to form.

When one of Alex and Robin's favorite watering holes, the Fauborg Hotel, closes down after its new owners lose interest, they get all gussied up for one last hurrah there. Unfortunately, the usual employees have already been paid off, and the temporary help doesn't have the zeal for quality to which our friends have become accustomed, but while they are there they observe a young woman, whom they assume to be some sort of minor celebrity because of her behavior and the presence of a man who looks like a bodyguard outside the hotel, being stood up. When Milo visits them later and they find out that the woman's body has been discovered, a victim of a brutal murder, in Topanga Canyon, Alex has all the justification he needs (though we know from experience he needs very little) to become deeply enmeshed in Milo's investigation.

The trail leads to a very successful Internet dating service, run by Armenian immigrants, which connects rich sugar daddies with young, beautiful women who are "searching for their soulmates". It seems to hit a dead end shortly after that when it turns out that the woman's last "daddy" died over a year ago due to natural causes. So Milo and Alex pursue an alternate course investigating the "bodyguard", who has a bit of a shady history.

There's a second plot thread, in which Alex consults with a former "Hollywood Madam" who has terminal lung cancer about helping her young son to deal with her impending death. It provides a bit of distraction from the main investigation, and the minor clues that she provides for Alex and Milo don't really contribute all that much. I wonder if it was included just so Kellerman, a clinical psychologist, can sprinkle a little shrink lore into the story.

The identity of the murderer was fairly obvious to me in the early going, but Kellerman does a good job of suspensefully dragging out the solution for our two heroes. I'd rank this mystery about average in the Kellerman canon.

Short Takes

(11/28/09) Reading John Christopher's Bad Dream, which is not very engrossing. I think he peaked with his young adult novels back in the 60s. Ah well.

(11/29/09) Finished the Christopher this morning - I still have no idea what it was all about, could it have been the middle novel in a trilogy?

(11/30/09) Scalzi's Old Man's War was remiscent of Heinlein and Haldeman. Put some more of his stuff on reserve at the library.

(12/2/09) Finished Blindman's Bluff by Kellerman. It was an ok read, but not riveting

Hangman by Faye Kellerman

Faye Kellerman always provides a good read with her Decker/Lazarus novels. A couple of characters from one of Decker's early cases, Chris Donetti, and his wife, Terry, show up in this one. Donetti and Terry are in a troubled marriage. Well, living as the wife of a contract killer can't be all roses, now, can it? Terry asks Decker to be there when she meets with Chris to tell him she wants a separation. Shortly after the meeting, things go awry, and Terry disappears, leaving behind their teenaged son, Gabe.

Right about that time, a woman's body is discovered, hanging naked from the rafters of a house under construction, and Decker gets the case. As he digs into her life to try to find some suspects, the novel turns into the usual methodic investigation, and eventually takes some odd twists, as there turn out to be more than one villain in the piece.

But this novel isn't as much about detective work as it is about family, really. Decker and Rina take in Donetti's son, Gabe, and give him a home while Decker is trying to find out what became of his mother. It's unclear whether she was murdered by Chris, or whether she took the opportunity to run away from her life, leaving her son behind. He stays in the bedroom that used to belong to Rina's two sons, who are now away at college, with only Hannah still at home. Hannah becomes like a big sister to Gabe, and gets him involved in helping out with her school choir, as he's a quite accomplished pianist.

When the family gets together for Decker's birthday, they include Gabe, and make him feel welcome in all ways, for as long as he needs to stay. Rina and Decker are an example of how good, stable, parents treat their kids, and other people's kids, too. In real life, people like them quietly go about helping others, and tend to acquire quite a few "adoptees", who forever feel like part of the family.

So, the murder eventually gets solved, and all is well, but I think Mrs. Kellerman just needed to add another personality to the Decker/Lazarus mix, and did it in a way that took the edge off of what could have been a brutal and depressing novel.

Deception by Jonathan Kellerman

Kellerman, as we have come to expect, delivers a good, amusing read in Deception. Alex and Milo investigate the murder of a prep school teacher who has left a DVD behind accusing several members of the faculty of sexual harassment. The case has some delicate political implications because the chief of police's son is a student at the school, and any scandal there may affect his chances to get into Harvard, so the duo must tread carefully. As they start with the usual suspects and work their way through the less usual ones, things get twisty quickly, and the case never really untwists, it just becomes transparent at the end.

Kellerman does a good job of capturing the arrogance, smarminess and false intellectualism of the instructors at the prep school. When Milo is interviewing the staff there, he and Alex are fully aware of just how shallow these folks really are. There's a great scene where one of the instructors, unaware that Alex is a psychologist, attempts to baffle him with psycho-BS. I have to wonder how Kellerman really feels about the intellectual "elite" that our hallowed institutions of higher learning are turning out these days; is he serious, or just playing to the peanut gallery here?

Great characters, great dialogue, and a surprising ending make this a classic in the Alex Delaware series.

The Executor by Jesse Kellerman

http://www.steelbookshelf.com/2010/03/golden-globe-by-john-varley.html
I thought at first that perhaps Jesse Kellerman was the son of Jonathan and Faye, and would produce some excellent mysteries and thrillers, but I'm afraid he writes another genre altogether. My wife read it first and seemed to like it, so I gave him a shot. I have to say it's not exactly my cup of tea, but the writing itself shows major talent.
Kellerman tells the story of Joseph Geist, a PhD candidate in Philosophy at Harvard who is at an impasse in writing his dissertation, and seems to have stalled out in his life, as well. His girlfriend throws him out of her apartment and her life, and he's forced to find a new place to stay. He answers an ad in the student newspaper placed by someone who is looking for a "conversationalist", hoping to make a bit of money for rent.
And so begins his relationship with Alma Spielman, an elderly woman who suffers from neuralgia and loneliness. She was raised in Vienna as a child of a wealthy family, and pays Joseph quite generously to come by her house several times a week to keep her company and talk of philosophy or whatever crosses their minds.  After Joseph encounters problems with the roommates in his new place, Alma invites him to move in to her spare bedroom, and for a time there is a peaceful routine, punctuated by attacks of her illness, which worries Joseph.
Things get more complex when a ne'er-do-well nephew rolls into town and starts pestering Alma for money. Alma raised him as a child, and still loves him, so she's a soft touch when it comes to giving him money for his vices. Joseph resents this, but nothing can be done about it.
However, when Alma passes away suddenly, things get wild rapidly. She leaves the bulk of her estate to Joseph, and that portion which she leaves to the nephew is bound by some very particular conditions that must be fulfilled in order for him to claim it. I won't spoil the ending for you, you'll have to read it yourself if you really want to know, but I will say that the whole thing is very depressing, and not at all what I was expecting.
Kellerman is actually a noted young playwright, and it shows in the intensity of his writing, and the tortured nature of his characters. The protagonist, Joseph Geist, reminded me quite a bit at first of some other classic troubled and self-absorbed characters from authors I'd read, such as The Great Lorenzo from Double Star by Heinlein, and Kenneth Valentine from The Golden Globe by Varley, though his "maturation" process takes a very different twist than those characters.
One quote from the book that I really liked was "...a row of books is more than a compendium of information. It's a map of all the places your mind has been, a group of friends standing silently by to comfort you."

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Evidence, by Jonathan Kellerman

I really have enjoyed all of Kellerman's stuff over the years. Jonathan or Faye? Yes.
Evidence seems to be a return to the earlier style of Milo and Alex just working their way through a very difficult and twisty case, without a lot of danger involved, more or less a police procedural novel.
Two people are murdered in an abandoned construction project in an upscale neighborhood, their bodies left in a sexual pose. The man was an architect, who had nothing to do with this project, but had worked for a Green avant-garde design agency, while the woman, at first, is unidentified.
As Milo and Alex begin to dig deeper, the trail of evidence leads them all over the place. The woman turns out to have been an FBI confidential informant on the subject of ecoterrorism, and eventually they find a past connection between the two victims. The mansion under construction turns out to belong to a middle eastern royal, and Milo and Alex rattle a few diplomatic cages along the way. Not long after the initial crime, an unknown arsonist burns the crime scene to the ground, killing another apparently innocent bystander. Thinking there's a connection to the inital crime, the two hare off on that rabbit trail next.
Ultimately, the book solves three separate mysteries, and is pretty good entertainment. The only disappointment is that only one of the mysteries gets a tidy wrap-up, and the others are left with a few dangling ends, questions unanswered. Perhaps this is closer to the reality of true crime than the usual novel.