The Murder Book
Alex Delaware • Book 16
by Jonathan Kellerman
Why You'll Love This
Someone mails Alex Delaware a scrapbook of crime scene photos with no return address — and one of them could get his best friend killed.
- Great if you want: a thriller where friendship and loyalty drive the stakes
- The experience: slow build that tightens steadily into a genuinely tense finale
- The writing: Kellerman layers psychology into plot — characters think, not just act
- Skip if: 614 pages feels long for a mystery without sprawling subplots
About This Book
Someone has mailed Alex Delaware a book of death — an ornate album filled with crime scene photographs, including one image that stops his old friend, LAPD homicide detective Milo Sturgis, cold. Who sent it, and why? The question pulls both men into a decades-old case involving a brutalized young woman, buried secrets, and powerful people with strong reasons to keep the past exactly where it is. Kellerman builds the stakes quietly at first, then relentlessly — this isn't just a puzzle to solve but a threat that closes in on the people Delaware cares about most.
At over 600 pages, The Murder Book earns its length. Kellerman uses the extra space not to pad the story but to deepen it — layering Los Angeles geography, institutional corruption, and the psychology of violence into something that feels genuinely complex rather than simply long. His prose stays lean even when the plotting grows intricate, and the relationship between Delaware and Sturgis carries an easy, lived-in texture that sixteen books of history quietly rewards. Readers who've followed the series will find this one of its most personal installments; newcomers will find themselves wanting to go back to the beginning.