Murder with meals

Jonathan Kellerman has written a lot of books about his characters Detective Milo Sturgis and psychologist Alex Delaware. Motive is the thirtieth of these. At one time I read them all as they came out but it’s a while since I read any although I didn’t have any trouble catching up with the series with this book.

I always feel that there’s a big hurdle to get over with these books and that’s that Milo consults Alex all the time and they attend crime scenes together. I don’t know if this really happens in real life but it seems unlikely to me. In the earlier books Alex was consulted because the police needed a psychological input but now he just appears to be another detective and his skills aren’t really called upon so you do have to wonder why he is there. After you accept their working relationship and the fact that Alex appears to investigate and interview people on his own then this series is a good, solid set of crime novels, all of which are very readable.

In this volume a woman is found dead. Then there is another dead woman. The two don’t seem to be connected except that in both circumstances someone has left a meal for two set out but uneaten in the vicinity of the corpse. This then links these two murders to one in the past which Milo was unable to solve but where there was also a meal laid out. Milo and Alex have to work out the connection between the women in order to find out who is committing the crimes.

The book follows the investigation and the interviews the two conduct and the evidence which they find. They talk frequently about the case and have a number of theories, each of which proves to be wrong so they have to come up with another one until they find the murderer. There are plenty of suspects and the investigation has lots of twists and turns.

I enjoyed this book, especially as it’s a while since I have read one in this series. If you are looking for well written crime novels then it might be worth trying one of these books – I don’t think that you need to have read the others to understand this one as there is no overarching story but it might be best to start earlier in the series for your first read.