Open Season

The latest installment in Jonathan Kellerman's long-running Alex Delaware series follows psychologist Alex Delaware and his longtime collaborator, LAPD Homicide Lieutenant Milo Sturgis, as they investigate a string of sniper killings linked by a single rifle. The case begins with a young woman's overdose death and expands into a multi-victim conspiracy orchestrated by a self-appointed avenger.

Milo calls Alex to review security footage from Westside Acu-Care Hospital, a struggling medical facility in Los Angeles. The grainy video shows a man in a dark hoodie speeding into the hospital's drop-off area at 2:53 a.m., carrying a body from his car and depositing it on the pavement before driving away. The car has no license plates, the man wears gloves and a face-covering hood, and the camera is too antiquated to capture useful details. Fingerprints identify the victim as Marissa Adrianne French, a 25-year-old aspiring actress who works on-call as a caregiver at a nursing facility. Her final social media photo, time-stamped the previous Friday at 11:34 p.m., shows Marissa in a red dress beside a much older, muscular man with a tattoo sleeve, soul patch, and gold chain. His body language is possessive; her eyes appear glassy. Alex tells Milo the man's size matches the figure on the video, and the timeline suggests he drugged Marissa, likely assaulted her, and dumped her body when she stopped breathing.

Marissa's four high school friends from Reseda confirm she never used drugs and had recently mentioned meeting "a producer." She attended invitation-only events through a company called BeThere.com, serving as decorative atmosphere at boutique openings in hopes of advancing her acting career. Her mother died about five years earlier and her father died when she was a baby, leaving her with almost no family.

The case turns sharply when Detective Petra Connor from Hollywood Division reports the murder of Paul Allan O'Brien, 43, shot once through the neck on his apartment balcony on Selma Avenue. A .308 full metal jacket bullet, a type of rifle ammunition with a metal casing designed to stay intact, nicked his carotid artery and jugular vein. On the floor of O'Brien's bedroom lie Marissa's clothes, shoes, and purse, along with GHB (gamma-hydroxybutyrate, a powerful sedative commonly used as a date-rape drug) in fish-shaped squeeze bottles, diazepam pills, and marijuana. O'Brien matches the man in Marissa's final photo and owns a dark compact car consistent with the hospital footage. The shot likely originated from a utility room in the adjacent building, but the shooter left almost no forensic evidence.

Ballistics link O'Brien's murder to an unsolved Hollywood shooting nearly two years earlier: the killing of Jamarcus Parmenter, a 27-year-old aspiring rapper and former member of the Crips, a major Los Angeles street gang, shot in the neck outside a music showcase. Parmenter had been managed by Gerald Irwin Boykins, also known as Jamal B, a former Crip turned music producer who fired Parmenter over a business dispute. A team assembles at the West L.A. station, including Petra, her partner Raul Biro, detectives Sean Binchy, Alicia Bogomil, and Moe Reed, and retired detective Hawes "Buck" Buxby, who originally investigated the Parmenter case. Both shootings display remarkable precision, each bullet targeting the neck's major vessels, pointing to a practiced marksman. Alex raises the possibility that both victims were killed by someone avenging victims of sexual aggression, given O'Brien's predatory history and Parmenter's misogynistic rap lyrics.

When Milo and Alex visit Boykins at his Beverly Hills home, they find a 51-year-old man using a wheelchair after a stroke. Boykins recognizes O'Brien as a freelance bouncer but reacts with visible hostility when shown Parmenter's photo. Alex notes this telling distinction and later discovers that Boykins's daughter Keisha, a bright 17-year-old being homeschooled, is the focus of intense parental protectiveness. Buxby eventually uncovers that Parmenter's rap lyrics contain direct threats of sexual violence against Keisha, providing the Boykins family with a clear motive.

Meanwhile, O'Brien's former roommate Martin Kehoe reveals that O'Brien brought home roughly 12 to 15 women from club events during their two years together, some of whom he carried out unconscious in the middle of the night. Through a confidential source, Alex discovers another of O'Brien's victims: Victoria "Vicki" Saucedo, a 26-year-old fashion consultant at Chanel on Rodeo Drive, who was overdosed on the same drug combination and left in a hospital parking lot. Vicki is now blind, quadriplegic, and cognitively impaired. Her brother Michael studies mathematics at Oberlin College in Ohio on a full scholarship.

The case expands when a .308 murder in Ventura County is linked to the same rifle. The victim, Whitney Lara Killeen, 34, was an accountant shot in the neck while rowing on a private lake with her 27-month-old son, Jarrod. The boy drifted beside his dead mother for about an hour before a neighbor spotted them. The primary suspect, Jarrod's father Jay Christopher Sterling, had a verified alibi. A fourth California victim then surfaces: Emmanuel Rosales, a 55-year-old retired physics teacher, shot through the neck while taking out his garbage. A former colleague reveals that one of Rosales's students, a boy named Errol Moffett, died by suicide over a grade, and the Moffett family blamed Rosales.

Alex's partner Robin helps him crystallize a unifying theme: Each murder appears motivated by someone protecting a child. Following this thread, Alex investigates the gifted children connected to each family and discovers that a math tutor named Cameron Flick links them all. Flick tutored Keisha Boykins, Errol Moffett, Michael Saucedo, and one of Sterling's college-age twins, Rhiannon Sterling. Marriage records reveal Flick was born in Vantage, Ohio, the same town where one of two older .308 victims was killed, a man who turned out to be Flick's stepfather. The second Ohio victim was an Oberlin College custodian who caught a student in a threatening situation and was killed weeks later. Flick was dismissed from his doctoral program for inability to produce original work shortly before the California killings began.

The team places Flick under surveillance for three days, tracking his routine of tutoring wealthy families and living modestly in a rented garage. On the third day, Flick visits a shooting range in Santa Clarita, where he fires a camouflage-patterned Winchester .308 Featherweight. The range owner recovers the bullets, all showing tight groupings centered on the neck. A ballistics comparison confirms the match.

Six detectives arrest Flick outside his home after he returns from surveilling the house of a family whose daughter bullied one of his students. A search yields the rifle, a nightscope, multiple firearms, and bladed weapons. His computer, unprotected by a password, contains files on each victim headed "Ansatz," a mathematical term for setting up a proof, and ending with "QED," Latin for "what was to be demonstrated." The files reveal that Flick appointed himself avenger for each family after his students confided their distress: Rhiannon wept about her father's custody battle; Keisha expressed terror over Parmenter's threats; Michael shared his despair at law enforcement's failure to investigate Vicki's assault; and Errol's death is described as "an outrage" requiring "remedial measures." None of the families contracted the killings.

Flick fires two court-appointed attorneys and announces he will represent himself. He summons Milo for a jailhouse interview, lecturing about the "heroic" precision of his kills. Milo deliberately dismantles Flick's intellectual self-image, revealing that his professors barely remember him and introducing Alex as a psychologist who earned a doctorate from the same university. Flick's composure shatters; he pounds the table, screams, and loses coherence. Three days later, Flick is found dead in his isolation cell. He used a sharpened pen clip to cut his neck, then sliced his wrist after swallowing stockpiled Tylenol. Milo briefly worries that his confrontation contributed to the death, but Alex reminds him that Flick was deeply disturbed and would have continued killing.