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Jesse Kellerman comes by his writing jones honestly -- his father is suspense novelist Jonathan Kellerman and his mother suspense novelist Faye Kellerman. Jesse comes in between his parents alphabetically on bookstore shelves and more or less cuts a course between their styles as well. Jonathan's best-known character is psychologist/sleuth Alex Delaware, who works as a talented amateur with is friend, a Los Angeles police detective. Faye's mainstay series focuses on detective Peter Decker and adds some definite police procedural flavor to her stories. Jesse's books have had a mystery at the center, but haven't relied on professional lead characters to work through them.

The Genius is Jesse's third novel. His debut, Sunstroke, was a taut little mystery that worked well even if it didn't completely satsify. His 2007 Trouble faltered in a big way. Trouble managed to be banal and grotesque at the same time, a task previously attempted by Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho. Trouble isn't as grotesque and is shorter, which puts it ahead of Ellis's ugly book.

But The Genius is a significant step forward. Ethan Muller, the spoiled youngest son of a rich family who also works as a successful art dealer, is called to a decaying slum by a family employee. There he finds literally thousands of strange drawings left behind by a stranger tenant named Victor Cracke. Ethan's family owns the slum, so he takes the drawings and prepares to make a show of them. Then news coverage draws unpleasant interest -- an anonymous writer warns Ethan to stop the show and a retired police detective says some of the faces in Cracke's work are those of crime victims.

Ethan begins to work with the detective and his prosecutor daughter to try to figure out what exactly Cracke drew and who he was. Kellerman also develops Ethan as a character through the novel, and we watch him confront some of the more artificial aspects of his personality as he finds himself dealing more and more with people who have concerns and lives with which his sophisticated career and wastrel history have never brought him in real contact.

Some of the straight-out philosophical musings Ethan indulges don't completely work, but overall The Genius satisfies as a crime novel, a mystery and as an exploration of how a flawed person confronts some of the cracks in his own facade.