Nobody - leastways, nobody in their right mind - comes to Jonathan Kellerman for a deftly turned phrase, Amisetic phrasing, or that razor-edged lexicon for which he is justly celebrated. These are airport novels of a superior kick, heavy on pages, thick on plotting. If you avoid coming to Kellerman for slick characterisation and piercing intellect it is possible to gobble a novel like The Clinic in outlandish bites and not get left with the stomach acid the likes of the laughably popular Patricia Cornwall trails in her distended wake. This is Kellerman's twelfth in as many years - making eleven outings for child psychologist cum dilettante detective Alex Delware - and one of his very best.

Hope Devane is dead. Prominent feminist and author of successful pop-psych Wolves and Sheep: Why Men Inevitably Hurt Women and What Women Can Do to Avoid It, she was viciously stabbed in the affluent stroll of "generous haciendas and California colonials" near the university where she worked. Her book was an angry indictment of men and an incitement to her mouthy opponent on a nuts'n'sluts TV show. Her handling of harassment cases on the university Conduct Committee was at best combative. And the shadowy clinic for which she advised looks to counsel on more than just fertility. For three months the police have probed the life of this formidable woman and the best Detective Milo Sturgis can manage by way of a suspect is an O.J. Simpson.

Now he's turned to best friend Delaware for help on Case Number 94-7765 and the layers of mystery and duplicity are slowly being peeled away as the psychologist bores his way through to the truth. Strewn along his path are a real pick'n'mix of murdered Vegas hookers, embittered soap players, terrified students, S&M clubs, and - lest anyone figure Delaware's losing his U.S.P. - the obligatory buried pasts and childhood traumas.

Kellerman marshals all of this with considerably more skill than seen in his last, the grisly atoll-bound Agatha Christie meets Mulder and Scully saga of The Web. In common with what still remains his best book, 1986's Over The Edge, The Clinic tosses in death and riddles from the outset, throws in Delaware to sort it, and smothers everything in a thickly convoluted gravy of secrets and lies. (And congrats, while we're at it, to the art director at Little, Brown for such a wittily misleading dust-jacket.)

All those things make this recognisably Kellerman as much as the insistent liberalism and fierce topicality that seams his work: False Memory Syndrome; the sensitive handling of Hope's politics; abortion; Sturgis as the only out gay cop in the LAPD. The Clinic does what it does, leaving you satiated and without the horrid queasiness of lacklustre imitators like Cornwall or Steven Martin Cohen's forthcoming (and deeply reactionary) Becker's Ring. Junk it may be, but junk of a most superior stripe.