‘Breakdown’: Top psychological thriller writer wins again

Alex Delaware and Milo Sturgis are chatting again, and that can mean only one thing: Jonathan Kellerman has delivered yet another compelling, dialog-driven psychological thriller.

In 'Breakdown” (Ballantine, $28.95, 350 pages), Delaware and Sturgis talk their way through a complex narrative, and that's truly the joy in Kellerman's storytelling. The give and take. The cerebral probing. The wry quips. The character development revealed in the insightful patter.

Delaware, a child psychologist, is asked to see a former television actress who has been committed involuntarily after a psychotic episode in the backyard of a suburban Los Angeles residence. His only connection to the patient is that he was asked to by a colleague to evaluate her 5-year-old son about six years earlier in a custodial situation.

Delaware arranges to have Zelda Chase placed in a group home setting, but she walks away and is found dead in the garden of a plush Bel Air estate. Her severe mental health issues and complications from longtime homelessness and malnutrition are the likely causes of her demise. But it turns out she was poisoned.

Often asked by Sturgis to consult on complicated homicide cases, Delaware is the initiator of the pairing this time. He gets the detective interested in the case, and a dogged pursuit of resolution ensues as more people disappear. Pieces of the puzzle slowly but surely develop as threads are tied together through intellectual insight and painstaking procedural research.

Delaware is driven by an intense desire to discover what happened to the son of the now-deceased mother, and that obsession allows Kellerman to delve into the mental state of the psychologist himself. And that lets the reader learn even more about this character who has stood front and center in 31 novels since 'When the Bough Breaks” debuted in 1985.

A lot of the usual suspects are involved here, including family secrets, greed and revenge. Add a spice of old Hollywood, and things get really intriguing. But in the end, it's the relationship between Delaware and Sturgis - and their intellectual word play - that sets this series apart.