A Cold Heart is a book that picks up speed as it goes along. Not until the last few chapters does it really have a good suspenseful story. It is not one of Jonathan Kellerman's better Alex Delaware stories but it is still worthy of the four stars that were awarded in this review. ( )

A long forgotten blues guitar player is attempting a comeback when he is brutally murdered outside the club he is playing at. After a police detective see some superficial relationships between this killing and murders of other artists he calls in Alex Delaware, LA psychologist and part-time police consultant. This is the 17th Delaware book but I've only read a few. The stories are pretty good but Delaware comes across to me as a bit whiny in his personal life. ( )

An interesting take on relationships, Alex and Milo, and Petra introduced in an earlier, standalone novel. Also converging is the world of art in its many guises: jazz and classical performances, seedy nightclubs and struggling art galleries, and the fan-zines.

In this case, a sequence of murders occur to artists who are making professional comebacks in all these fields that Petra begins to investigate with her new partner, the silent and stoic Eric. She calls in Milo and Alex, and each of them handles seemingly innocuous details of these cases in their own unique way.

The point-of-view of each Petra and Alex chapters are separate, and the aspects of the cases they work are clear and unmuddied. In addition to the police procedural chapters there are the psychological insights into the killers' motives: as we trace a car at a junkyard, the questions begin about the young man who abandoned it and what happened in his family to make him commit these crimes.

And of course there is the grit of after-hours Los Angeles alongside the privilege and glitter of Century Center and Bristol. And academia and hard-edged police work and trying to work through personal relationships to humanize the main characters. ( )

Ein Alex-Delaware-Roman. - In Los Angeles geht ein psychopathischer Serienmörder um. Seine Opfer: bislang erfolglose Künstler. Der Psychologe Dr. Alex Delaware, der zusammen mit seinem Freund Milo Sturgis von der Mordkommission ermittelt, glaubt an Ritualmorde. Als sie endlich eine heiße Spur haben, führt diese zu Alex' Ex-Freundin...

This was not one of the best Alex Delaware books but I still enjoyed it. Petra makes another appearance in this book with a new partner Eric. Alex is with a new love interest and Robin is living with a new man. Lots to complicate their personal lives.

There are several murders in and around the LA area as well as others around the country that Alex thinks might be related. Petra is trying to solve one, Milo another and others have given up on some of theirs or put them down to things like drugs. There are many heads required to solve this one. ( )