And Just Keep Bookin' On

Although Jonathan Kellerman's protagonist therapist Alex Delaware sometimes describes himself as a kind of "danger addict," Kellerman's best Delaware novels use the psychologist's point of view as their center rather than the police angle. As his more recent books have moved into a police procedural mode, their distinctiveness and quality have lessened.

Guilt brings psychological themes back onto the stage more prominently than they have been in awhile, but they don't directly affect the story as much as they might. The discovery beneath a storm-downed tree of a long-buried infant skeleton brings Los Angeles police lieutenant Milo Sturgis onto the case, along with his friend Alex. Was there a greater crime than just a clandestine burial? Another gruesome find nearby makes the case more urgent. Alex and Milo will interview several people as they try to follow leads in each case. Some of Alex's interviews will have more to do with his profession than his hobby of helping Milo, but also wind up having little to do with the case.

Kellerman throws a Hollywood power couple into the mix that thinly disguises its mix of Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Paris Hilton, Madonna and several other famous goofballs, but the switch to focusing on them comes in such a way as to seem almost like a different book. In fact, an important element of the original story is dealt with as more or less an afterthought even though digging into it takes up much of the first half of the book.

Guilt is a good enough read for a Delaware fan, with a few welcome sparks of the series' earlier psychological focus. But Kellerman doesn't ever seem to let those gain traction in the story, and the novel itself meanders more than it ought before winding up a little too fast.

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John Sandford's Virgil Flowers books are written with unofficial co-authors, people with whom Sandford has worked or who are close friends. Storm Front's helper is Michele Cook, who worked at a Minnesota newspaper with him.

Flowers is an investigator for the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, the state's main investigative agency. He handles a portion of the state for the agency's lead investigator, Lucas Davenport -- the protagonist of Sandford's "Prey" series -- and also seems to pick up on whatever oddball cases come along. So when Israeli antiquities officials determine a potentially valuable and historically explosive artifact was stolen by a Minnesota professor and minister who's now back home trying to sell it, you know who will get the call.

A pair of thugs who work for a Turkish crimelord, some Hezbollah agents, and no small amount of mystery surrounding the Israeli antiquities expert will not make finding the thief or the artifact nearly as easy as Virgil believes or wants.

Front has a definite comic tone -- the Hezbollah spies are more interested in finding out which bars are better for picking up women, and the Israeli agent brings large empty suitcases to carry back American purchases she can sell at home tax-free. Virgil wants this case over because he would really like to more closely investigate the female ringleader of a supposed timber scam -- and not solely for law enforcement purposes.

It reads like Sandford and Cook wanted to write an Elmore Leonard novel, only instead of Leonard's assortment of originally quirky characters and situations, they try to Elmore-ize some stock tropes from NCIS and Breaking Bad, then throw in Virgil in some of the more cut-and-paste dialogue, responses and situations Sandford has put to paper.

The Flowers novels have been uneven, depending pretty significantly on what kind of story the co-author brings to the table, and there's nothing that says Elmore Leonard or Donald Westlake were the only people who could write comic crime fiction. But Front might have been a lot better with some more time and consideration given to actually writing it rather than re-typing a bunch of other sources.