Copyright 2004 by Jonathan Kellerman. Published by Ballantine Books, New York.
I was expecting this to be a mystery featuring Alex Delaware, Kellerman’s most popular protagonist. But it is actually his second novel featuring Petra Connor, a female detective in Hollywood CA. Delaware is mentioned several times but does not appear as a character in the book. Her unlikely assistant in this one is Isaac Gomez, a nerdy PhD candidate who is interning for the police in pursuit of a thesis. He is a statistical whiz who discovers, in the cold case data, a puzzling series of murders which all occurred on June 28 – one per year for 6 years. There is no commonality among the victims or the locations, but all were killed by blunt force applied to the back of the skull. Six victims in six years, all by the same method, all on the same date. Coincidence? Isaac says “no way.”
Petra is busy with another case – a multiple homicide outside a nightclub – but she thinks Isaac is onto something significant, so she takes on the serial killings as an off-the-books case, in her spare time. The problem is that it is early June and if it is, in fact, a once-a-year serial killer at work, then she has less than a month to save the life of another innocent victim.
Most of the suspicion falls on the husband of the first victim. Which, of course, makes him the least likely candidate to be the actual culprit in a whodunit. The search for the real perp is interesting but due to the large number of victims and the intertwining of her work on the other case, it gets confusing. And a lot of prose is devoted to convincing the reader that the husband is guilty. I wasn’t drawn in deeply.
5 out of 10.