Runaway Boy Brings New Angle to O.J.-Like Tale

Nobody evokes Los Angeles better than Jonathan Kellerman, so it’s only fitting that his riveting new novel, “Billy Straight” (Random House, 467 pages, $25.95), is based on the ultimate L.A. crime--the slayings O.J. Simpson was tried for.

Billy Straight, a bright, decent 12-year-old, has run away from his mother’s abusive boyfriend and is living by his wits in Griffith Park. One night, hiding behind some rocks, he sees a man stab a woman. Terrified, Billy flees.

The victim is identified as Lisa Ramsey, the coke-snorting, honey-blond ex-wife of Cart Ramsey, a minor television star with a history of domestic violence. Ramsey is out playing golf--at night--at his Calabasas estate when Petra Connor, a beautiful, artistic homicide detective, arrives to tell him that his ex-wife is dead.

And surprise, surprise, Cart Ramsey is accompanied by his best friend, Greg Balch, with whom he used to play football. One of Connor’s fellow detectives even jokes, “Where was O.J. at the time?” All that’s missing is the race card.

So successfully does Kellerman transcend the too-familiar details that you can’t help wondering why he even bothered ripping them off in the first place. My guess is that he was motivated by an intense desire to make things work out differently than they did in real life.

Petra is an intrepid cop, tenacious even as her boss hampers her investigation because, “we’re not going to look like idiots on this one.” Still, what gives the book its depth is Billy’s heroic effort to survive while being pursued by bounty hunters, police and the killer.

Billy practices equations because “I knew I had to keep my mind busy or it would get weak,” and tries to remain civilized while eating out of dumpsters. The scenes where he is befriended by Sam Ganzer, a Holocaust survivor, are particularly moving, and it’s a pleasure to wallow in Kellerman’s intensely moral universe, where the good get rewarded and the bad get what they deserve.

Being arguably the worst cook in the world, I can’t vouch for the recipes that author Katherine Hall Page includes at the end of “The Body in the Bookcase” (William Morrow, 244 pages, $22), her latest Faith Fairchild mystery. But her literary concoction is satisfying and surprisingly delicious. Fairchild, a clergyman’s wife and owner of a catering firm, is distressed when she pays a parish call on her elderly friend Sarah Winslow and finds Sarah dead, bound and gagged in the course of a burglary.

There’s been a string of burglaries in her tiny town of Aleford, Mass., and the next week the parsonage where Faith lives is ransacked. She mourns the loss of her possessions and vows to pursue the crooks who have “stolen the Fairchilds’ peace of mind.”

Though caught up in preparations for a blue-blood wedding, Faith begins checking local pawnshops and networking with fellow victims. She stumbles upon some of her cherished heirlooms at a designer show home and is on the trail of shady antiques dealers. The plot is clever and the characters ring true. I bet her polenta with Gorgonzola is divine.

“Haunting Rachel” by Kay Hooper (Bantam, 346 pages, $22.95) is best read while lying on a beach on a tropical isle. Only then would you be languid enough to overlook the preposterous plot twists and accept the book for what it is--a mindless page turner with a gothic twist.

Rachel Grant was 19 when her fiance Thomas Sheridan took a last-minute job piloting a cargo plane to South America. But his plane disappeared and so did Thomas, apart from a ghostly farewell to Rachel. Ten years later, she returns home to Richmond, Va., to settle the sizable estate of her parents, who also died in a plane crash. Rachel has never gotten over losing Thomas, and coupled with her present grief she’s in a fragile state. So, imagine how unhinged she becomes when she keeps seeing a dead ringer for Thomas.

The man, who says his name is Adam Delafield, tells Rachel that her investment-banker father loaned him $3 million from a secret Swiss bank account on a handshake. Rachel wants to believe him, even though she’s involved in a series of near-fatal accidents that take place when Adam is around.

Despite her questionable judgment and her tendency to hallucinate, Rachel is likable and the reader roots for her as she searches for her father’s missing records and confronts his mysterious partner. Still, the denouement is predictable and Richmond could be West Covina, for all the local color the author supplies.

The Times reviews mysteries every other week. Next week: Rochelle O’Gorman on audio books.

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This Sunday: Adam Bresnick looks at seven new “Star Wars” books, and considers the birth of the entertainment-industrial complex.