Book Review: Night Moves by Jonathan Kellerman

Published in 2018. This is the thirty-third Alex Delaware novel in this author’s repertoire. I have to admit that this is the first one I’ve read. He’s written many other novels as well some with his wife and his son. It’s a writing family.

To my surprise, Alex Delaware was not the main character in this book. I expected he would be. He’s a psychologist who works with the police and is often brought to the scene of a crime. In this case, a body was found dead and no one knows who it is. The owner of the house, Chet Corvin, finds the body in his house and ends up dead, a few weeks later. More dead bodies show up, seemingly all unrelated. Lieutenant Milo Sturgis leads the investigation and calls upon Dr. Alex Delaware to provide some sense to the murders, but there’s little to go on. The police must rely on their investigative skills to solve this one.

The overall mystery of this novel was interesting, but it is written from the point of view of Dr. Delaware, who’s an observer in many of the scenes. The initial scene at the murder seemed somewhat confusing to me as it starts out in first person, but follows the action of the other characters, i.e. the police, as the crime scene is secured. While Dr. Delaware does assist in the solving of the murders, he’s really not the reason the murders are solved. And the conclusion wasn’t a real surprise.

The author has the police jargon down pat and includes much of the sarcasm and wry humor that results with many years on the job. He also has a tendency to use uncommon words periodically, maybe to stimulate the reader’s vocabulary. Well, I skip those words and read on. If I stopped to look them up in the dictionary, I probably wouldn’t have read the whole book.