Blood-Spattered Perversion in Jerusalem : THE BUTCHER’S THEATER<i> by Jonathan Kellerman (Bantam Books: $19.95; 627 pp.)</i>

Sexual Perversity in Jerusalem: Once it was war’s barbarity that gave the name Butcher’s Theater to the hills of Jerusalem. Now, in Jonathan Kellerman’s long ambitious thriller, a depraved knife-wielding serial killer--whom the sensationalist press comes to call the “Butcher”--leaves the carved-up bodies of young Arab women around those same hills.

Among the many pleasures of this book is Kellerman’s rendering of modern Jerusalem in all its fantastic complexity. After three remarkably successful thrillers set in Los Angeles and featuring psychologist-detective Alex Delaware, it’s good to see Kellerman break a mold that threatened to strait-jacket his creativity. And Jerusalem as a setting was an inspired choice. He takes us far beyond the cliche of a city “sacred to three major religions”: He gives us secular Jews and religious Jews and fanatically religious Jews (including a brilliant cameo of a rabbi and Knesset member who’s a dead-on ringer for Meir Kahane); he knows there are Christian Arabs--one of the detectives, for instance--as well as Muslim, caught in a strange limbo of their own; he shows us pious righteous Christians and Jew-hating Christians. They all interact in a city of choking traffic and the Western Wall, of hookers and discos and the stations of the Cross.

At its heart, the book is a police procedural, with Israeli police and Israeli bureaucracy and Israeli politicians, each with their own agenda. A Mephistophelian murderer is on the loose, and a specially formed team of cops fights to solve the puzzle before he kills again, and before the killings of Arab women threaten to tear apart the delicate web of Jerusalem’s Arab-Jewish relations. Success for a writer in this genre comes when he can portray the investigative process, with all its inevitable plodding legwork and chasing down of false leads, without bogging the narrative down in mind-numbing details. Mostly, Kellerman succeeds, deftly guiding the reader through the roller-coaster suspense of a complicated story, though the book’s excessive length leads to occasional tedium.

The main characters represent a nice cross-section of contemporary Israeli attitudes and backgrounds, centering on Superintendent Daniel Sharavi--dark-skinned Yemenite, maimed hero of the Six-Day War, drop-out law student and painfully honest cop, devoted family man (and the depiction of Sharavi’s family life is one of Kellerman’s strongest suits, until he drags in the apparently inevitable resentment of Sharavi’s long-suffering wife over his all-encompassing involvement in the “Butcher” murders. Let’s face it: As characters, resentful wives of devoted cops have become tiresome and banal stereotypes).

As he did for Los Angeles in the Alex Delaware novels, Kellerman explores Jerusalem’s seediest and ritziest sections. Like Simenon’s Maigret books, the gritty details of daily life--meals, especially, but also the many sights, sounds and smells of the city--become intimately interwoven with the plot, enriching it.

A look at today’s headlines shows Kellerman’s keen perception of the society he’s writing about. With eerie prescience, he writes of violent Arab demonstrations and panicky young soldiers’ responses, of a 14-year-old girl caught and killed in the cross-fire. He’s also good at capturing the near-universal Israeli contempt for the United Nations as it performs its functions in Jerusalem and elsewhere. The sneering sarcasm, the mordant humor, is exact. In fact, scattered throughout the book are tossed-off lines and caustic jokes and insults that feel and sound authentic. This is how Israelis talk; this is how they think.

For all its wonderful qualities as a genre novel that manages to be something more, there are elements of the book that may be off-putting to some readers. Mostly, its graphic and extreme carnage. There is blood all over; animal blood, as we get a glimpse into the mind and history of the psychopathic killer who began by cutting up cats and dogs; human blood, the blood of the killer’s victims--in flashbacks in the killer’s mind, and in the contemporary story. One could argue that since the killer is a sexually perverted racist fiend of profound evil, we need to see just how he cuts up his victims and what he does with the body parts to get the full effect of his evil. Maybe so, but to me it’s excessive in the same way slasher movies are, exploiting gore and savagery rather than using them artistically. And the climactic fight scene is probably the most ensanguined I’ve ever read.

One can always carp: I’d like to see less of the long conversational scenes whose only purpose is to convey information. And, as with most thrillers, one’s willingness to suspend disbelief is sometimes strained to the breaking point. Ultimately, though, the many riches of the book submerge the cavils. In bravely staking out new literary territory, Kellerman has written a compelling story full of idiosyncratic characters in a beautifully rendered setting.