Tuesday, March 12, 2019

Psychologist Alex Delaware and Detective MIlo Sturgis Take on Another Very Strange Case

As the thirty-third Alex Delaware novel opens, a very dysfunctional L.A. family of four returns from a Sunday night dinner out to find a murder victim left in the family's den. The victim's face has been blown away by a shotgun and his hands have been cut off. He's obviously been killed somewhere else and left here, but why?

Homicide Detective Milo Sturgis is totally flummoxed and so does what he always seems do do with every even remotely complicated case that he sees: he dials up his buddy, psychologist Alex Delaware, in the hope that Alex can sort things out for him. Alex races to the scene and begins offering his thoughts.

The family members all swear that that have no idea who the victim might be or why he would have been left in their den. This is hardly surprising since, given that the victim has no face and no hands that might be fingerprinted, nobody at this point has the slightest idea who he might have been or why he would have been left in that spot.

The father is a total blow-hard; the mother is a pain in the butt; the teen-age son is a complete jerk, and the daughter is just plain weird. Alex will have his hands full trying to figure these guys out, but they all claim that no one could be angry enough with them to have done something like this in their home.

This is a fairly wealthy and insular neighborhood, and the canvas turns up a very strange neighbor who everyone thinks might be a great suspect, mostly just because there are no other obvious suspects in sight. But the guy refuses even to talk to the police or to Alex and so they spend a lot of time spinning their wheels. Other suspects will emerge; another victim will be murdered, and Alex and Milo will try to get it all sorted out. To be honest, though, I have to say that I barely cared whether they did or not.

With apologies to anyone who has read my reviews of the last few books in this series, I will repeat what I've said before: I absolutely loved the first few books in this series. Alex Delaware was a great new protagonist and--most importantly--in the early books there were actually legitimate reasons for him to be involved in these investigations. He was a consulting police psychologist and the police used him in cases where his expertise was genuinely needed.

In many of the recent books though, the notion that Delaware would be seriously working as a psychological consultant has gone out the window to a very large extent. Milo invites Delaware to participate in practically every investigation that comes his way, irrespective of whether there's a legitimate need or not. This book is a good example.

Given the screwy nature of several of the characters in this novel, somewhere down the line Milo might have asked Delaware to provide some insight, but there's no legitimate reason to be dragging him into the case even before the criminologists have left the scene of the crime. A man's been murdered by a shotgun blast--like no one's ever seen this before, and like any reasonably intelligent homicide detective would need to call in a psychologist at this point?

As the novel progresses, Alex will offer the occasional psychological observations, most of which are no more sophisticated than those that might have been offered by anyone who's taken Psych 101. Frankly, the author seems to have gotten to the point where he often doesn't even make much of a pretext that Delaware's skills as a psychologist are essential to the story. Clearly, he just exists at this point to be Milo's Best Bud and to help him solve the crimes that come his way.

If Delaware were another homicide detective, rather than a psychologist, it would make sense for him to be heavily involved in this case and the story would make for a reasonably decent novel. But he isn't, and it doesn't. And as someone who's been reading this series from the beginning and who remembers how great it once was, I find myself increasingly frustrated and disappointed with what it's become.

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