Meet Eddie DeSilvia, immediate past police chief of San Diego and a man looking forward to plenty of rest and relaxation on his boat Make My Day. He has hardly hung up his shield when Pauline Graham, a friend and psychologist, asks him to look into the death of a friend’s father. The friend, Allison Graham, is suspected of helping her terminally ill father commit suicide, an act that is a crime in California.  DeSilvia does a little digging and in the process realizes that the evidence just doesn’t add up and that the truth may be found 30 years in the past. He knows he’s getting too close when someone tries to sink his boat and, failing to kill him that way, cuts the brake line of his car. DeSilvia is determined not to throw in the towel but will he survive long enough to determine the truth?

Murder by the Numbers: The Righteous One, by Richard Hicks, is the inaugural Enneagram novel that introduces recently retired police chief Eddie DeSilvia. I love mysteries and this one doesn’t disappoint. The character development has been done especially well and the stage is set for a future romance between DeSilvia and Graham. They make a good team in this novel and could easily become one of the better pairings in mystery literature today. One of the most interesting facets of the novel is the weaving of the Enneagram Personality Typing system into the plot.  For those of you unfamiliar with this system, as I was prior to reading this book, it is a system similar to the widely- known Myers-Briggs test. DeSilvia and the psychologist Graham make extensive use of the Enneagram system in figuring out who might or might not have had a motivation for killing Allison’s father.  This is the most unique methodology I’ve seen in a novel since the Lincoln Rhyme novels by Jeffery Deaver.  I am pleased to give this novel high marks on all counts and look very forward to future novels in this series.