It's worth noting that Jonathan Kellerman published his only non-Alex Delaware novel - the messy and ultimately rather pointless The Butcher's Theatre - around the same time as Thomas Harris finished The Silence of the Lambs. Since which, Kellerman has issued a further six beefy tomes (a couple of thousand pages plus), and Harris has done precisely nothing.

Lecter's father, of course, is much better than child psychologist cum blockbuster author Kellerman, but in the absence of something new from the mysterious Mr. Harris, The Web is a much better prospect than, say, whatever is currently grinding out of the Grisham factory.

This book sees child psychologist Delaware and his lover Robin Castagna on sabbatical from Los Angeles. On the invitation of beneficent local land owner Dr Woodrow Wilson Moreland, they are guests of the tropical island of Aruk. For his keep, Delaware will help the older man organise his sloppy case files for publication.

But all too soon they find the proverbial trouble in paradise: Moreland confesses involvement in American post-war nuclear testing and seems unhealthily preoccupied with a vicious murder some months previous, with its dismemberment and evidence of cannibalism. Another guest at the house is killed in a plane crash, and to cap it all, the doctor's faithful assistant Ben is found unconscious in the fresh entrails of a newly mutilated victim. Something is clearly rotten in the state of Aruk.

The suspects are lined up for inspection: the sinister brace of beach bums; the objectionable American journalist who claims to be writing a book about the region; the peculiar couple staying with Moreland, she studying the weather for the government, he along for the ride; and the doctor's own medically trained daughter back on a working visit. Take your pick.

The final revelations are as headshaking as the freight-train rush of the earlier Time Bomb. For all it might be unstoppable, the reasoning behind all the grisly stuff seems to stumble clean out of another place entirely. The bare bones may read like a more abrasive Agatha Christie, but the logic (sic) behind the murders, the antipathy towards the curiously sleepy US airbase exiled at the far end of the island, come straight out a pleasingly icky episode of The X-Files.

By the time you pass the 350 page mark the revelation of the killer's identity scarcely seems to matter any longer. Like Time Bomb, Kellerman's new book has escaped him and made for the hills marked OUTRAGEOUS. The writing is merely functional but at least competent, the politics nudging open the gates of PC. Milo Sturges, Delaware's gay police detective buddy, is shoehorned in on the end of a telephone to fill in the gaps, and the end is suitably handwringing.

The Web is a great big chocolate cake of a novel. There is nothing subtle nor nourishing about it all. Pages flip past in the blink of an eye, and you emerge, literally, blinking in the light, sated but hardly enriched. In Harris's absence, though, sometimes that's enough.