Making use of elements taken straight from recent headlines and filled with plot developments and character types that might seem familiar to avid readers of mystery and suspense novels (the main story revolves around the well-used “boy who cried wolf” formula), “Gone,” Jonathan Kellerman’s latest Alex Delaware mystery, is an off-balance combination of the too familiar and the quirkily original.
It should be noted that Kellerman does throw in an original twist here and there, which might add a surprise or two to the reading experience of those who like their pleasures fast, formulaic and guilty.
For those not familiar with Kellerman’s protagonist, Alex Delaware is a criminal psychologist and one-time Missouri resident turned L.A. denizen. He frequently teams up with Detective Milo Sturgis, a gay man who can “pass” as heterosexual because of his surly attitude, growing paunch and a pair of sideburns that makes him look like “the worst type of Elvis impersonator.”
When a young couple, Michaela Brand and Dylan Meserve, go missing, no one seems to notice, which is not surprising since Michaela is the product of a white-trash family and Dylan’s parents are long dead. Then Michaela is discovered – naked and hysterical, after freeing herself from her captive’s bonds – on a dusty back road near Latigo Canyon by an elderly gentleman. They tell a tale to the media of abduction at gunpoint by a masked man, starvation, dehydration, the works. But the evidence leads authorities to conclude that Michaela and Dylan faked their disappearance and kidnapping.
Assigned the task of interviewing Michaela, Alex learns that the two are struggling actors and that Dylan talked his girlfriend into pulling the stunt. Apparently, Dylan wanted to please Nora Dowd, a wealthy drug user and owner of The Playhouse. It seems that in the course of teaching an acting seminar, Nora was thoroughly unimpressed by their abilities. Unrepentant (she says it was Dylan’s idea and his fault) and apparently unaware of the trouble she is in, Michaela leaves Delaware’s office, only to be found dead soon after. Strangled and bound in rope similar to the kind she and her boyfriend used during their hoax.
Alex and Milo are soon on the hunt for Dylan. Their investigations lead them to The Playhouse and Nora Dowd. When Milo and Alex discover that other thespians have attended Nora’s seminars only to disappear off the face of the Earth, they go about the drudgery of gathering solid clues and facts, trying to determine whether Nora or the still-missing Dylan is responsible for Michaela’s murder.
Kellerman uses short chapters, a technique that is nearly a requirement in today’s thrillers, to hold the reader’s attention whenever his narrative wanders off into the land of expository, conversational investigation. Good friends Milo and Alex frequently engage in one-on-one banter about the ups and downs and ins and outs of their ongoing investigations. While the technique does tend to put the brakes on the suspense portion of the narrative, Kellerman is quite good at witty repartee, and the dialogue is always entertaining.
In the end, Kellerman’s narrative leads Alex and Milo to a denouement (surprising to some, not so, perhaps, to the truly experienced mystery reader) that is suffused in elements both original and very familiar. On sum, if one is looking for a quick, sometimes suspenseful read that doesn’t require a heavy investment, and whose plot details and prose may be lost to memory in a month or two, “Gone” may well be just the thing.
Dorman T. Shindler is a freelance writer from Missouri.
Gone
By Jonathan Kellerman
Ballantine Books, 384 pages, $26.95
