I almost passed this one by, because I’ve kinda been over Kellerman. His last book struck me as predictable and formulaic at the time. This one however is super fun so far!
Chapter 1 of this book makes us familiar with a loser-ish young fellow whose crappy underpaying job is to watch an abandoned construction site, a really ugly mega-house whose construction was abandoned years ago. It’s the “eyesore at the top of the hill” in an extremely upscale neighborhood.
The Checkov’s gun principle says this guy will matter to the plot down the road. He’s not a very promising fellow, so I’ll be interested to see how that happens.
At the the end of the chapter he discovers two bodies on the top floor!
We have a crime!
The watchman finds dead bodies in that ugly building. Now we have a crime!
In chapter two the men that are the backbone of these books get together. They are:
- Milo Sturgis – physically imposing but unkempt LA police detective who we long time readers know is gay as gay can be, but so far that has not been introduced in this story.
- Alex Delaware – child psychiatrist who works out of his home office. It’s been so long now I do’t even remember the origin story of why Milo always calls him to join him to visit crime scenes and even to talk to witnesses.
In this case the murder site is like three miles from where Alex lives. That is to say that it’s in the very upscale part of LA. But it has a whole different feel and style to Alex’ modestly scaled neighborhood.
There’s some fun dialog with an attractive coroners assistant. The dead guy was carrying his wallet, so they have a good ID on him (Desmond Backer), but no clue on the woman.
Then they lightly interrogate the watchman kid, who kinda freaks out a little … because (I think) he’s just too mentally slow to quite get what’s going on.
The really entertaining stuff happens next chapter when they attempt to run down where the dead guy worked.
It’s a run-down building with fancy pretensions at the downscale end of Main Street in Venice. Milo has hilarious dialog with a gorgeous shaved-headed German woman who answers the door.
She says priceless little tidbits like this:
p 24 “Modern humanity – post-industrial humanity is a criminal biomechanical disruption of the natural order.“
It’s not that often that you run onto someone who talks like that! 🙂
We meet his co-workers. They are all women, and in the coffee room we find that he apparently had sex with all of them. The young ones aren’t surprised about each other, but they all are kinda surprised that the older woman who is the co-owner of the company (Marjie) went for his line of BS. “Only once” she says.
(you can guess how much everyone believes that!)
There’s an interlude where Alex talks to his girlfriend for a page or two.
I am reminded again that Kellerman is great at forensics and characters and even great character dialog in the investigation, he’s really wooden with romance and day-to-day talking. Maybe that’s just life the way is! 🙂
Now that I’ve started this rant, dialog between Milo and Alex is can pretty be lame also. Alex’s little jokes to Milo are usually pretty bad. I guess when you have the same crime-fighting duo for 17 books it’s hard to keep coming up with snappy new greetings. 🙂
The kid from the first chapter does turn up again!
p 93 He’s in a tussle with this well-appointed but shabby around the edges fellow at the site – Charles Rutger.
Apparently Rutger’s family did own the house way back in the day when it was just a normal McMansion, but they sold it to the mysterious entity DSD for reasons unknown.
Milo has a very entertaining conversation with Rutger’s family lawyer, the upshot of which is that Rutger may a little crazy
Around p 125, things start happening!
- we get a lead that DSD might not be be Arab after all.
- It IS oil money from a Muslim country, but it’s a made-up island nation called Sranil off the coast of Indonesia that happens to be sitting on top of huge oil reserves.
- Backer’s sister is finally back from family vacation and returns Milo’s calls.
- She says the dead girl went to high school with him.
- p 122 Coroner reports says no sexual assualt, no autopsy necessary.
- Milo is not pleased.
This violates all his intuitions about what happened, but that’s what the coroner says!…
- Milo is not pleased.
- p 124 Alex comes up with Sranil independently from late night web surfing.
More about Sranil
p 128 We never meet the two main Sranil dudes, but they are:
- the Sultan – very conservative devout Muslim.
- We know he’ a convervative Muslim because he thinks you only need one Rolls-Royce to get around (and maybe one for backup).
- But maintaining 5 or 6 or 15 Rolls’ as his son is ostentations and blasphemous.
- Prince Tariq – the polar opposite. He was the ultimate LA playboy who got into plenty of trouble and was eventually called home.
More about Des Backer’s back story
- p 131 Milo finally gets ahold of his sister and breaks the news about Des Backer murder.
- She says the dead girl was Doris Fredd. A high school friend.
- She was a bit of a bad girl as the story unfolds.
- She was sent to a local rehab place called Hope Lodge .
.. which the locals called “Ho Lodge” :))
- p 138 Next day Des’ sister has driven down from the Seattle area in Milo’s office.
- p 142 We starting getting to get a strong whiff of good ole Pacific Northwest radical leftist “save the trees” politics!
- Des loved the song “Burning Down the House” :)) (me too!)
- Politically motivated house fires are a theme in this book.
- THEN sis finally comes clean that Des shipped her a couple of heavy valises containing $50K in the form of 1,000 $50 bills!
- p 143 She stashed them in the storage unit where they put their parents’ stuff.
- “Please don’t tell her husband”
- p143 Milo calls the Port Angeles police to get the cash
Sparring with the Feds
p 147 Milo has been harrassing the FBI for whatever information they have on the dead people, and his usually reliable sources have been completely silent.
We think because of Sranil money!
Today he gets an in person visit from a real live Special Agent named Gail Lindstrom.
She’s here about Doreen, doesn’t know anything about Des. Doreen was in deep with home-grown eco-terrists in Seattle from all the way back to high school.
There are pages of repartee of varying quality. Gail is super-stingy with information, ad she has pissed off Milo enough that he’s giving her nothing for free. She has to she work for it. There’s a couple of pages of them trading insults about Federal screwups vs LAPD screwups. I could’a done without that. Didn’t help my appreciation of the story any.
p 161 Eventually we get aroud to the Sranilis. They trade bits of info that inform each other, but we the readers already know it. 🙂
p 165 Milo gets a drop-in from a bitchy coroner who tells him she made an error by not doing the rape kit. What happened is too gross for me to talk about, so I won’t.
.p 168 They uncover some very interesting stuff about Sranili culture being maybe 2/3 modern Muslim, but 1/3 holding on to some dicey-sounding animist beliefs from it’s tribal days. It’s also pretty gross, so I’m skipping that too.
p 179 There’s been talk for half the book about vegan Jell-o, which is a kind of homemade napalm popular with the militant tree-huggers. It gets invoked a lot for the rest of the book.
p 186 The event we all saw coming, finally came!
Somebody torched the house on Borodi Lane!
(The scene of the crime that started the book if you haven’t been keeping up!)
188 The slightly batty old fellow whose family used to own the place was incinerated. He was having a little champagne and pate in a private party with himself on the third floor when the place went due to planted charges. (I.e. at least manslaughter if they catch ’em!)
We think he was collateral damage, the arsonist(s) did’t know he was there.
192 The nice neighbor they talked to a few chapters ago came by to report that there was a Swedish Bikini Team blond woman jogging past three times just that day!
(His words! You can tell what decade he grew up in 🙂
The get a visit from Marjie pointing the finger back at Helga, who we haven’t heard from for a while.
p 206 More research on Helga shows that she’s Swiss, not Swedish (Swedish is cooler I guess). Her parents are very rich bankers, and most interesting she has a cute and buxom (and apparently very nice) party-girl sister named Dahlia.
Milo’s has had his two really talented young detectives (Sean and Moe) the job for the last 100 pages. Moe (the Doc Martens-wear former punker) comes up with a young Indonesian women who was good friends with Dahlia.
p 209 She shows up to talk to Milo “tiny, gorgeous, terrified”. She talks for about 16 pages of fun things they did together, many including Teddy the Sranili playboy!
p 222 She and Milo drive to Brentwood so she can show him where Dahlia lived. No one’s seen Dahlia for quite a while, but sister Helga is living there now.
p 242 Putting Helga on the 11 oclock news produced a tip about a garage space she rented. Backer and Doreen (the dead girl, was Doris in high school, but goes by Doreen now) were there a lot.
p 254 They stake out the place and nab Helga and bring her in for an interview.
p 256 The interrogation is super dramatic. They cover a lot of ground.
p 268 Milo gets under her skin about Dahlia, but can’t faze her about killing Backer.
p 270 Milo finally springs it on her about the old guy who was partying on the when she torched the house. That gets to her!
p 277 She gets the last .. word by swallowing a cyanide pill she had hidden in her wig, and is dead in seconds.
We find what happened to Dahlia
All these high level players, the Swiss banker parents and the Sranili landlords and playboys) have got Milo in touch with the Chief of Police … a mixed blessing!
Somehow they are tipped that the Sranilis have an airplane hangar! I think is was the police chief, but in any event, it was definitely the chief that told him to not bother asking the Srinalis for permission. The would have stalled him, so justs do it!
p 284 Milo and the boys search the airplane hanger.
p 286 Inside there is a lot of fancy stuff. Including four really, really fancy cars and a white Prius(!)
Milo goes straight to the Prius of course, where surprise, there are two dead bodies! They’ve been there about 2 years. (yuck!)
DNA shows the woman is Dahlia. (Too bad, I liked her, and kinda hoped she wasn’t really dead. ):. We think the fellow is the Prince, but no one has actually said that yet.
So the two year old mystery of the disappearing Prince and Helga’s party girl sister is now buttoned up, along with Helga as arsonist.
Which is nice, but …
We have less than 50 pages of book left, and no clue who did the original murders that opened the book!
We’re not the only ones to notice this:
Milo is given two weeks more to solve the case, then he will be re-assigned to gang stuff and the case file will go into the unsolved bin.
Spoiler Alert (again 🙂
It all happens pretty quick after this:
p 290 Waay back in the middle of the book, Milo got a tip from a pay phone (how rare is that nowadays?) about seeing Doreen in the neighborhood and being afraid of someone named Monte.
“WhoTF is Monte?” has been a recurring question for pages and pages.
Just as the two weeks are running out and Milo is settling into his new Southwest Division gig, a patrol officer spots an old fellow using the pay phone.
p 292 The old fellow in question is a really cool 91 year-old short black dude who grew up in Baton Rouge (so he has a lovely southern accent 🙂 .
He saw Doreen living at the house of a creepy dude (Monte) as he took his daily walk around the neighborhood.
He’s scared of the dude because he gave him a creepy staredown when he saw him on the street seeing her. Then two weeks later Milo put her picture on the evening news and the fellow called in.
In the heavy irony department, if Monte had killed the old dude they never would have caught him.
p 299 Milo and Alex scope out the house.
The dude living there looks very much like the average-sized dude in a grey hoodie who has turned up everywhere for the last 100 pages.
p 301 But the woman he lives with (who replaced Doreen as girlfriend) is the big shocker of the book:
It’s the Coroner’s Assistant from all the way back in the first chapter!!!
Didn’t see that one coming!
We finish up with a fun 10 pages of cat-and-mouse with Milo nailing down the coroner lady in her testimony.
Then a less fun 4 pages of tailing Monte home from the law office where he works, to find a safe place to arrest him. They do the best they can, but he’s a bad-ass and draws on them anyway.
The coroner said he had 28 bullets from 5 different guns in him.
A pretty fun, engaging book all in all!