Serpentine by Jonathan Kellerman

 

Milo Sturgis is at the top of his profession as a homicide investigator in Los Angeles.  As such, he is surprised and offended to be handed a loser case from top administration.  A woman was killed over thirty years ago.  Her car was found crashed and over a cliff, burnt with a body inside.  But it was no accident.  The woman inside had a bullet in her head.  Over the years, several detectives had been assigned the case but with no witnesses or forensics, made little headway.

Sturgis calls his friend, Alex Delaware, a psychologist who helps him with his harder or stranger cases and this one qualifies.  The case was assigned because someone with money and influence got to the right people in the department.  Milo and Alex go to meet the woman and find that she is in her thirties and a millionaire after selling her sports clothing line.  Ellie only knows that her mother deserted her and her stepfather when she was young, three or four.  After that she never saw her again and her stepfather raised her until he was killed in a hiking accident.

The two men start to investigate.  They soon find that another woman, around the same age as Ellie, is involved.  When Ellie's mother left her stepfather, she ended up in L.A. living at the house with Vera's father.  Vera's mother had died when she was ten and her father went a bit crazy afterwards.  Although she was only ten, he soon had a harem of scantily clad blondes rotating through the house, staying for days or weeks.  Ellie's mother was one of these women.

The pair discover that other women in the harem had disappeared over the years.  Some became respectable matrons, marrying men of influence while others just disappeared, probably drifting on somewhere else.  But there were too many deaths and coincidences to be natural.  Can Milo and Alex solve the case after so many years?

This is the thirty-sixth novel in this series.  Jonathan Kellerman hit on a winning formula when he created Milo and Alex and readers will not be disappointed in this latest one.  The crime is fresh and the writing intriguing.  As the case unfolds, it is in turns amazing yet logical that one fact leads to the next and the next until the mystery is unraveled.  This book is recommended for mystery readers.