To Live and Die in L.A.

Jonathan Kellerman was a child psychologist before he began writing fiction. The hero of most of his previous 14 suspense novels, Dr. Alex Delaware, is a child psychologist too. So Kellerman would seem to be leading from strength in making the title character in “Billy Straight”--the sole witness to a knife slaying in Griffith Park--a 12-year-old kid.

Billy is a runaway. His mother, a farm worker in the San Joaquin Valley town of Watson, is chronically drunk or stoned; her boyfriend, Buell “Motor” Moran, is 300 pounds of abusive biker trash. For the four months since he rode a bus to Los Angeles, Billy has camped in the park, hoarding the few dollars he stole from his mother, sleeping wrapped in sheets of plastic, dumpster diving for food, trying to educate himself with books he steals from a library, then conscientiously returns.

Billy is very bright. But the marvel is that he has emerged from such a background with his idealism intact. “To get enough money so no one would use me, I’d have to be educated.” He has organization and self-discipline, finely developed scruples and a religious aversion to leading the “wrong life” through drugs or prostitution. Studying algebra, he “liked the idea of variables, something meaning nothing by itself but taking on any identity you wanted. . . . I thought of myself as X-boy--nothing, but also everything.”

The unlikelihood of all this nags at us, even as Kellerman alternates the sections narrated by Billy with a tangle of other story lines.

Rookie LAPD Detective Petra Connor and her mentor, Stu Bishop, try to investigate the killing despite problems. The victim, Lisa Boehlinger, is the ex-wife of Cart Ramsey, square-jawed star of a low-rated but long-running TV detective show, who is known to have beaten her at least once. Police brass, fearful of another O.J. Simpson fiasco, urge extreme caution. Ramsey’s maid, a potential key witness, disappears. Bishop becomes preoccupied, indifferent to the outcome of the case. Connor broods over her divorce, her infertility, her abandoned career as an artist and a nice-looking sheriff’s deputy she met at Ramsey’s Calabasas estate.

Suspicion shifts from Ramsey to his business manager, Greg Balch, to a thuggish Austrian seen with a woman butchered in Redondo Beach a few years previously. Connor’s investigation of the crime scene turns up some of Billy’s belongings, and a sympathetic librarian describes him. The victim’s father, a doctor, tries to jump-start the investigation with a $25,000 reward. The offer is broadcast along-with Connor’s drawing of the boy’s face--her art skills paying off at last.

Meanwhile, Billy, already spooked by the slaying, meets an elderly couple at the L.A. Zoo who prove to be a pedophile rapist and his sadistic, videocam-toting wife. Billy escapes them, barely, but he has lost his money and his safe haven, and he can no longer trust anyone--even Sam Ganzer, a Holocaust survivor and caretaker of a synagogue in Venice, who genuinely tries to help the boy.

Connor’s only hope is that she can find Billy before the bad guys do. The latter include not only the killer but Vladimir Zhukanov, an ex-Soviet cop reduced to selling trinkets at Venice Beach, and Motor Moran, both of whom are willing to do violence for the reward money.

Kellerman is the sort of writer who feeds information in short sentences and short paragraphs. This proves to be a long, slow way to tell a story. Much of “Billy Straight” is police procedure--something Kellerman knows a lot about, but, still, just police procedure. The revelation of the killer’s identity may come as a shock, but it doesn’t seem earned.

The best characters here are peripheral ones--the LAPD honcho in charge of the case, Boehlinger’s bullying father, the librarian who watches Billy study, an ex-cycle buddy of Moran’s turned businessman, a wealthy woman’s housekeeper. They live. Billy, though, is stillborn, an abstract conception more than a real kid. Kellerman seems to sense that he has failed, for once, with his unique brand of child psychology. He introduces an elaborate subplot to explain that Billy the pauper had a princely, if vanished, father, as if the idealism as well as the IQ could be transmitted simply by genes. No way.