You will want to read SERPENTINE in one sitting. That said, you should set aside a chunk of time to read or reread a couple of other books in the Alex Delaware series after you finish this one, simply for the understandably gluttonous pleasure of exposing your brain to the remarkable plotting and writing of author Jonathan Kellerman. Alex Delaware and Milo Sturgis have been around for a while, but even if you have been reading their exploits from the first book, each new entry is comfortably familiar where it should be and exotic and wondrous where it must be.

The “familiar” is the relationship between Kellerman’s protagonists. Milo, an LAPD homicide lieutenant, calls his friend Alex, a forensic and child psychologist, for input when he has a case requiring a fresh pair of inquiring eyes. They are comfortable enough with each other to the extent that Milo regularly raids the refrigerator in the home that Alex shares with Robin Castagna, his significant other, who is a world-renowned restorer of musical instruments.

"This is the 36th book in a wonderful series that has never missed a step. That it has not been adapted for a film or television series by a network or streaming service...is a mystery nearly as baffling as the ones that Kellerman crafts seemingly at will."

Those are the bedrock basics that support the solid, puzzling and seemingly unsolvable mystery at the core of each Delaware novel. This is particularly true of SERPENTINE. A chance meeting at a charity luncheon results in Milo being tasked with investigating a colder-than-cold murder case that has gone unsolved for 36 years. Andrea Bauer, the daughter of the victim, has practically no memory of her mother, who abruptly left her with her stepfather and moved to Los Angeles where she met a sudden and violent end. The case had been previously assigned on two separate occasions to different detectives, one now deceased and the other long-retired. The file is all but skeletal. What to do?

The answer is “get to work,” which is what Milo does, calling in a favor here and pulling a string there. He acquires a skeleton crew of police officers, and with Alex in tow goes two or three degrees of separation across and a couple of generations down in the hopes of getting a slim lead here or there. This is where the magic of the book unfolds, as the tenacious, occasionally gruff but always kind Milo chases down clues that are almost out of sight and mind, while Alex, compassionate to a fault, provides insight that very well could be lost. Indeed, it is Alex who hunts down what proves to be some key evidence in the case, simply by asking “why” and pursuing the answer to the question into an otherwise unlikely place.

This is the 36th book in a wonderful series that has never missed a step. That it has not been adapted for a film or television series by a network or streaming service (there have been rumors, but nothing has appeared so far) is a mystery nearly as baffling as the ones that Kellerman crafts seemingly at will. Perhaps it is just as well. They arguably could never be as good as the books, especially when it comes to SERPENTINE.