Are you a fan of Alex Delaware books? Bob Moyer is, and he’s just read No. 40 in the series.

Reviewed by Robert P. Moyer

OPEN SEASON. By Jonathan Kellerman. Penguin Random House. 273 pages.

$30.

Possible to probable to resolution.

That’s how most mysteries proceed, from the moment the crime comes to the attention of the police and clues start to accumulate. In most cases, the deliberation occurs slowly in the consciousness of one detective. In very few crime novels do the possibilities develop at the dizzying speed that they do in an Alex Delaware novel. That’s because the case gets bandied back and forth between Delaware, a clinical psychologist, and Milos Forman, an LAPD homicide detective. Drawing upon Alex’s knowledge of deviant behavior, and Milos’ experience with the criminal mind, the author turns the deliberation into dialogue, to both the entertainment and enlightenment of the reader.

And so it goes in the latest novel. A dead female is dropped at the door of a hospital. In what is a record short time in this series, Alex and Milos come up with the killer. When they arrive at the killer’s apartment, they find him dead, shot through the neck with a high-powered rifle. That is the mystery that powers this narrative. As they start looking for who would kill him, another, similar murder surfaces. And another. And another, all of them seemingly unconnected, and previously undetected. The rest of the story is the requisite bandying about all the possibles until they get to the probable. Each possible, aka red herring, takes the reader to an interesting place, with interesting people. With the resolution, the most interesting person of all appears, after hiding in plain sight — the killer. All this is enhanced by entertaining banter between the two sleuths, and frequent feeding frenzies by Milos, be it at a food truck or Alex’s refrigerator. It’s just good writing, and, thus, good reading