Twisted by Jonathan Kellerman

Hollywood detective Petra Connor has caught a bad one.  After a concert, someone drove by and opened fire on the fans, killing several of them.  Petra is put on a task force to find the killers.  Her boyfriend, Eric, is overseas with a special unit fighting terrorists and the only other thing on her agenda is mentoring a city councilman's pet project.  That project is a bright, some call him a genius, Hispanic kid who on the way to becoming a doctor has decided to get a master's in statistics and who thinks the police force would be a great place to write a thesis.  The kid, Issac, is nice enough but clueless about how a police force works.

So when Issac approaches Petra about an anomaly he has noticed, her first instinct is to brush him off.  He has discovered a series of murders, all of which have occurred on the same day in different years.  That day is June 28th and its about to roll around again.  Petra looks at the cases and discovers that all are unsolved and most had not gotten a very good investigation.  After looking at them for a while, she starts to believe that Issac may have indeed discovered a serial killer.  The question is whether she can discover who it is in time to stop the murder about to occur.

Most Jonathan Kellerman fans know him for his series about Dr. Alex Delaware, a former child psychologist who helps the police with investigations.  He wrote a few novels about Petra but then apparently decided to concentrate on the Delaware series.  Petra is an interesting detective, a woman who has made a success of her work and who strictly separates her personal life from her professional one.  This novel nicely hooks the reader into the serial killing while pursuing the drive-by killing and building the relationship between Petra and Issac.  It is recommended for mystery readers.