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.

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.

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.

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.