The Museum of Desire

The Museum of Desire
by Jonathan Kellerman
Recommended Ages: 14+

There's definitely something psycho about the latest homicide consulting psychologist Dr. Alex Delaware is called in on. In the backyard of a mansion rented out for a party, barely inside the LAPD's jurisdiction, a cleaner finds a stretch limo containing four dead bodies – including the limo driver. Drenched in blood (not theirs) from the waist down, killed in multiple ways, and posed in a disturbing (and therefore, seemingly disturbed) manner, the victims seem to have nothing in common. But the sickness of the scene gets even more sickening when Alex's girlfriend Robin pokes around on the internet and finds a lurid painting, missing since it was plundered by the Third Reich, whose subjects and their positions match the tableau in the death limo. Someone, perhaps with a connection to Nazi war crimes, has developed the dangerously dotty idea of reproducing trashy Renaissance art, using murdered bodies – and their ghoulish project isn't done.

Mystery-wise, it's another skillfully crafted police procedural, only with a detective who has an amazing case closure rate and a consulting psychologist whose talents, as always, play a key role. Just when you (along with everybody in the book) think you know whodunit and are only looking for the opportunity to spring the trap on them, there is, of course, a surprise – which is really only not a surprise to the extent that you're expecting a surprise, based on experience – though I don't think I would have guessed the particulars of this surprise even one time out of ten. The thought actually crossed my mind around the midpoint of the book, "By now Milo, Alex and I have seen the killer, but we have no more of a clue who or when than that one time it was some random guy spotted in passing, in Victims." And I was right, only the killer in this instance doesn't go quietly. The operation to arrest them is played for maximum suspense, with a climax of grisly shock.

These can be hard-hitting mysteries. For all his therapeutic training and experience, Alex continues to prioritize catching the bad guy above any individuals' psychological needs – up to a point. He does, to his credit, balk at putting pressure on a young witness who's on the autism spectrum, though he ends up getting the kid's evidence anyway. What he witnesses in this book is, for sure, not the kind of imagery you'd want to expose to someone in a delicate state of mind. And although he and Milo haven't aged (much) in the 30-plus years since they became sorta-kinda partners in crime, and seem to live in a changeless state regardless of the changes going on in the world around them, nevertheless a certain younger detective's difficulty processing the trauma that occurred in a previous book proves that what happens to these characters does affect them. If you cut them, figuratively speaking, they do bleed. Which, I suppose, is reality enough to keep us tuned in for installment after installment.

This is the 35th of soon-to-be 36 Alex Delaware novels, immediately following The Wedding Guest and scheduled, in February 2021, to be followed by Serpentine. With this book, I think I've read 13 of them, so I still have better than half the series to enjoy. Some of the titles I haven't caught yet are Silent Partner, Time Bomb, Devil's Waltz, Bad Love, Survival of the Fittest, The Murder Book, A Cold Heart and Breakdown.