BONES: An Alex Delaware Novel
Jonathan Kellerman
Ballantine Books
Psychological Thriller
ISBN: 9780345495136
Jonathan Kellerman’s Alex Delaware novels are very much character driven, with the psychologist often playing the slightly bemused chronologist of rumbled Los Angeles Homicide Detective Milo Sturgis. The basis for the majority of the books is somewhat simple: Sturgis draws a twisted murder case and brings Delaware in as a consultative expert. So too with BONES, as the body of a young female is discovered in a marshland near Marina del Rey. No attempt is made to conceal either the corpse or the victim’s identity.
Selena Bass was an attractive young music teacher tasked with tutoring a child prodigy on the piano. It is hard to conceive of a less likely victim. Yet further examination of the marshland unearths three other women, identities (and connections to Bass, if there were any) unknown. There is not a lot for Delaware to do, at least initially, other than to observe and narrate. Sturgis is assisted in the dogged police work by Moe Reed, a rookie homicide detective whose desire to do well is exceeded only by Sturgis’s single-mindedness.
Reed’s background is also interesting. His semi-estranged half-brother, Aaron Fox, is a former L.A. cop with a possibly sketchy past and current employment as a private investigator. Fox intersects with Sturgis and Reed when he is retained by Simone Vander to investigate Bass’s murder. Bass’s student, as it turns out, is Vander’s half-brother. The symmetry is subtle, and Simone’s interest in the case on behalf of her loved one contrasts nicely with the prickly relationship between the two half-brothers. A word or two here about that: Fox and Reed join an increasing burgeoning cast of secondary characters introduced in the Delaware series who quite easily could function as principals in their own novels. While it probably will never happen --- there are a finite number of hours in a day, even for writing, and commercial considerations that must be not only observed but also acknowledged --- theoretically it could be done.
As it happens, there is a suspect. Travis Huck has a record as both a criminal and a victim dating back to an early age, and his experience with the juvenile corrections system has left him scarred visibly and otherwise. Employed as a house manager by the Vander family, Sturgis’s radar slowly but surely hones in on Huck, who had opportunity and a possible twisted motive. Huck’s sudden disappearance does not help matters either. When a radical environmentalist who was the self-appointed guardian of the marsh is murdered as well, it seems as if the wetland is the focal point of the carnage. Matters, however, go much deeper than that, and, in the final third of BONES, Delaware’s involvement moves to the forefront as he is able not only to bring some semblance of peace to a tortured soul but also to save an innocent one from a deadly and greedy scheme.
While the focus of a great deal of BONES is off of Delaware, one constant that it has with the rest of the series is the quiet manifestation of Kellerman’s penchant for using his work as an ongoing triptych through the constantly evolving world of Los Angeles. This series is worth reading, from beginning to end, for that reason alone. One example: near the end of the book we encounter a middle-aged woman, a hanger-on, who typifies a great deal of a certain strata of the southern California lifestyle. Nonie is only present for a page or two, but Kellerman sums her up so perfectly that we don’t need any more than what we are given. The presentation is arguably worth the price of admission all by itself, even if you ordinarily avoid genre fiction. It is touches like these that have kept me coming back for almost the past quarter-century --- and will keep me coming back for (hopefully) the next.
--- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub
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