This series includes 29 books.
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Book 1When the Bough Breaks
by Jonathan Kellerman
Description :
In the first Alex Delaware novel, Dr. Morton Handler practiced a strange brand of psychiatry. Among his specialties were fraud, extortion, and sexual manipulation. Handler paid for his sins when he was brutally murdered in his luxurious Pacific Palisades apartment. The police have no leads, but they do have one possible witness: seven-year-old Melody Quinn. It's psychologist Dr. Alex Delaware's job to try to unlock the terrible secret buried in Melody's memory. But as the sinister shadows in the girl's mind begin to take shape, Alex discovers that the mystery touches a shocking incident in his own past. This connection is only the beginning, a single link in a forty-year-old conspiracy. And behind it lies an unspeakable evil that Alex Delaware must expose before it claims another innocent victim: Melody Quinn.
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Book 2Blood Test
by Jonathan Kellerman
Description :
It is a case unlike any psychologist Dr. Alex Delaware has ever encountered. Five-year-old Woody Swope is ill, but the real problem is his parents. They refuse to agree to the one treatment that could save this boy's life. Alex sets out to convince Mr. and Mrs. Swope--only to find that the parents have left the hospital and taken their son with them. Worse, the sleazy motel room where the Swopes were staying is empty--except for the ominous bloodstain. The Swopes and their son have vanished into the sordid shadows of the city. Now Alex and his friend, homocide detective Milo Sturgis, have no choice but to push the law to the breaking point. They've entered an amoral underworld where drugs, dreams, and sex are all for sale...where fantasies are fulfilled at any price--even at the cost of a young boy's life.
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Book 3Over the Edge
by Jonathan Kellerman
Description :
When the phone rings in the middle of the night, child psychologist Alex Delaware does not hesitate. Driving through the dream-lit San Fernando Valley, Alex rushes to Jamey Cadmus, the patient he had failed five years before—and who now calls with a bizarre cry for help. But by the time Alex reaches Canyon Oaks Psychiatric Hospital, Jamey is gone, surfacing a day later in the hands of the police, who believe Jamey is the infamous Lavender Slasher, a psychotic serial killer. Wooed by a high-powered attorney to build a defense, Alex will get a chance to do what he couldn’t five years ago. And when he peers into a family’s troubled history and Jamey’s brilliant, tormented mind, the psychologist puts himself at the heart of a high-profile case. Because Alex knows that in a realm of money, loss, and madness, something terrible pushed Jamie over the edge—or else someone is getting away with murder.
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Book 4Silent Partner
by Jonathan Kellerman
Description :
The bestselling author of When The Bough Breaks , Blood Test , and Over The Edge delivers the most stunning novel yet and featuring psychologist-detective Dr. Alex Delaware. At a party for a controversial Los Angeles sex therapist, Alex encounters a face from his own past--Sharon Ransom, an exquisite, alluring lover who left him abruptly more than a decade earlier. Sharon now hints that he desperately needs help, but Alex evades her. The next day she is dead, an apparent suicide. Driven by guilt and sadness, Alex plunges into the maze of Sharon's life--a journey that will take him through the pleasure palaces of California's ultra-rich, into the dark closets of a family's disturbing past, and finally into the alleyways of the mind, where childhood terrors still hold sway. Also available on BDD Audio Cassette.
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Book 5Time Bomb
by Jonathan Kellerman
Description :
Edgar Award winner Jonathan Kellerman once more  explores the corruption of California's golden  coast and produces a novel of complex  characterizations and nonstop suspense.  By the time psychologist Dr. Alex  Delaware reached the school the damage was done:  A sniper had opened fire on a crowded playground,  but was gunned down before any children were  hurt.  While  the TV news crews feasted on the scene an Alex  began his therapy sessions with the traumatized  children, he couldn't escape the image of a slight  teenager clutching an oversized rifle. What was the  identity behind the name and face: a would-be  assassin, or just another victim beneath an  indifferent California sky? Intrigued by a request from the sniper's father  to conduct a "psychological autopsy" of  his child, Alex begins to uncover a strange  pattern of innocence, neglect, and loss. Then suddenly  it is more than a pattern -- it is a trail of  blood. In the dead sniper's past was a dark and  vicious plot. And in Alex Delaware's future is the  stuff of grown-up nightmares: the face of real  human evil. Also available on BDD Audio Cassette.
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Book 6Private Eyes
by Jonathan Kellerman
Description :
The voice belongs to a woman, but Dr. Alex  Delaware remembers a little girl. It is eleven  years since seven-years-old Melissa Dickinson dialed  a hospital help line for comfort--and found it in  therapy with Alex Delaware. Now the lovely young  heiress is desperately calling for psychologist's  help once more. Only this time it looks like  Melissa's deepest childhood nightmare is really  coming true ...  Twenty years ago, Gina Dickinson, Melissa's  mother, suffered a grisly assault that left the budding  actress irreparably scarred and emotionally  crippled. Now her acid-wielding assailant is out of  prison and back in L.A.--and Melissa is terrified  that the monster has returned to hurt Gina again.  But before Alex Delaware  can even begin to soothe his former patient's  fears, Gina, a recluse for twenty, disappears. And  now, unless Delaware turns crack detective to  uncover the truth, Gina Dickinson will be just one  more victim of a cold fury that has already spawned  madness--and murder.
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Book 7Devil's Waltz
by Jonathan Kellerman
Description :
The doctors call it Munchausen by proxy, the  terrifying disease that causes parents to induce  illness in their own children. Now, in his most  frightening case, Dr. Alex Delaware may have to prove  that a child's own mother or father is making her  sick. Twenty-one-month-old Cassie Jones  is bright, energetic, the picture of health. Yet  her parents rush her to the emergency room night  after night with medical symptoms no doctor can  explain. Cassie's parents seem sympathetic and  deeply concerned. Her favorite nurse is a model of  devotion. Yet when child psychologist Alex  Delaware is called in to investigate, instinct tells him  that one of them may be a monster. Then  a physician at the hospital is brutally murdered.  A shadowy death is revealed. And Alex and his  friend LAPD detective Milo Sturgis have only hours  to uncover the link between these shocking events  and the fate of an innocent child.
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Book 8Bad Love
by Jonathan Kellerman
Description :
It came in a plain brown wrapper, no return  address--an audiocassette recording of a horrifying,  soul-lacerating scream, followed by the sound of a  childlike voice chanting: "Bad love. Bad love.  Don't give me the bad love... ". For Alex  Delaware the tape is the first intimation that he is  about to enter a living nightmare. Others soon  follow: disquieting laughter echoing over a phone  line that suddenly goes dead, a chilling act of  trespass and vandalism. He has become the target of a  carefully orchestrated campaign of vague threats  and intimidation rapidly building to a crescendo as  harassment turns to terror, mischief to madness.  With the help of his friend LAPD detective Milo  Sturgis, Alex uncovers a series of violent deaths  that may follow a diabolical pattern. And if he fails  to decipher the twisted logic of the stalker's  mind games, Alex will be the next to die. Taut,  penetrating, terrifying, Bad Love is  vintage Kellerman. Also available on BDD Audio Cassette.
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Book 9Self-Defense
by Jonathan Kellerman
Description :
Dr. Alex Delaware doesn t see many private patients anymore, but the young woman called Lucy is an exception. So is her dream. Lucy Lowell is referred to Alex by Los Angeles police detective Milo Sturgis. A juror at the agonizing trial of a serial killer, Lucy survived the trauma only to be tormented by a recurring nightmare: a young child in the forest at night, watching a strange and furtive act. Now Lucy s dream is starting to disrupt her waking life, and Alex is concerned. The power of the dream, its grip on Lucy s emotions, suggests to him that it may be more than a nightmare. It may be the repressed childhood memory of something very real. Something like murder.
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Book 10The Web
by Jonathan Kellerman
Description :
Psychologist-detective Dr. Alex Delaware finds terror in the heart of paradise in this relentlessly sinister novel by America's premier writer of psychological suspense, the author of ten successive New York Times bestsellers. Three months in paradise, all expenses paid. It's an invitation Alex Delaware can't refuse. Dr. Woodrow Wilson Moreland, a revered scientist and philanthropist on the tiny Pacific island of Aruk, has invited Alex to his home to help him organize his papers for publication-- a light workload leaving Alex plenty of time to enjoy a romantic interlude with Robin Castagna. Quickly, however, secretive houseguests, frightening nocturnal visitors, and the elusive Dr. Moreland himself dim the pleasures of deep blue water and white sand. The cases Moreland chooses to share--a patient driven to madness by a cruel, unspeakable act; a man who succumbed forty years ago to radiation poisoning after a nuclear blast; a young woman, brutally murdered, whose mutilated body was found on the beach just six months before-- seem unconnected. And yet Alex can't help wondering what the good doctor is trying to tell him...and what Moreland's real reason for inviting him to Aruk is. As Alex probes--with a little long-distance help from his friend LAPD detective Milo Sturgis--he comes to believe the answer lies hidden somewhere on Moreland's vast estate. Yet when he finally discovers the truth, the revelation will be more shocking than he could have imagined. And it will come too late to stem the tide of violence that threatens guilty and innocent alike on the lovely lost island of Aruk. Once again, with his brilliant characterizations and rapid-fire pace, Jonathan Kellerman has redefined the boundaries of suspense, probing real-life horrors and innermost fears in a novel that transfixes from first page to last. Also available on BDD Audio Cassette.
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Book 11The Clinic
by Jonathan Kellerman
Description :
Upon his return to Los Angeles from a harrowing adventure in the South Pacific, Alex is called upon by his friend Milo Sturgis to help solve the murder of a celebrity author. For three months the police found no clues to the murder of Hope Devane, psychology professor and controversial author of a pop-psych bestseller about men. She was found stabbed to death on a quiet, shaded street in one of L.A.'s best neighborhoods. The evidence suggested not random slaughter, but cold, calculated stalking. And the list of potential suspects was as extensive as the audience for her book and her talk show appearances. Newly assigned to the cold case, homicide detective Milo Sturgis calls on his friend, Dr. Alex Delaware to seek out insights into the victim's high-profile life. What Alex uncovers is a series of troubling inconsistencies about Hope, including her contradictory personas: the sensational, anti-male bestselling author versus the low-key scholarly university professor. But it is when Alex delves into Hope's childhood that he begins to understand the forces that made her the formidable woman she was--and the ties that entangled her life until the horrifying act of betrayal that ended it. From the Paperback edition.
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Book 12Survival of the Fittest
by Jonathan Kellerman
Description :
“FEVERISH IN PACE AND RICH IN CHARACTERS . . . THIS IS A CHILLING AND IRRESISTIBLE THRILLER.” – People The daughter of a diplomat disappears on a school field trip–lured into the Santa Monica mountains and killed in cold blood. Her father denies the possibility of a political motive. There are no signs of struggle, no evidence of sexual assault, leaving psychologist Alex Delaware and his friend LAPD homicide detective Milo Sturgis to pose the disturbing question: Why ? Working together with Daniel Sharavi, a brilliant Israeli police inspector, Delaware and Sturgis soon find themselves ensnared in one of the darkest, most menacing cases of their careers. And when death strikes again, it is Alex who must go undercover, alone, to expose an unthinkable conspiracy of self-righteous brutality and total contempt for human life.
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Book 13Monster
by Jonathan Kellerman
Description :
A second-rate actor is found mutilated in a car trunk. Then a psychologist at a Los Angeles hospital for the criminally insane is murdered in a similar grisly fashion. Suddenly the incoherent ramblings of an inmate at the presumably secure institution begin to make chilling sense--they are, in fact, horrifying predictions. Yet how can a barely functional psychotic locked behind asylum walls possibly know such vivid details of crimes committed in the outside world? Drawn into a labyrinth of secrets, revenge, sex, and manipulation, Dr. Alex Delaware and Detective Milo Sturgis set out to unlock this enigma and put an end to the brutal killings--before the madman predicts their own demise. . . .
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Book 14Dr. Death
by Jonathan Kellerman
Description :
Read by 8 cassettes/ 10 hours Someone has murdered euthanasia champion Dr. Eldon Mate--a self-styled Dr. Death responsible for scores of assisted suicides. In a burst of bloody irony, the killer chooses to dispatch the doctor in the back of his own suicide van, hooking Mate up to the killing apparatus dubbed the "humanitron"--and adding some butchering touches of his own. The case is assigned to veteran LAPD homicide detective Milo Sturgis, who turns, once again, to his friend Alex Delaware. But working this case raises a conflict of interest for Alex so profound that he can't even discuss it with Milo, and the tension that develops between cop and psychologist further complicates an already baffling and complex murder investigation. Dr. Death is a rich brew of unforgettable chracters, labryinthine plotting, page-turning prose, and the unique insights into the darkest corners of the human mind that have earned Jonathan Kellerman international accolades as the master of psychological suspense.
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Book 15Flesh and Blood
by Jonathan Kellerman
Description :
“RAZOR-SHARP . . . A SKILLFUL PIECE OF WORK.” – The Washington Post Book World Lauren Teague is a beautiful, defiant, borderline delinquent teenager when her parents bring her to Dr. Alex Delaware’s office. Lauren angrily resists Alex’s help–and the psychologist is forced to chalk Lauren up as one of the inevitable failures of his profession. Years later, when Alex and Lauren come face-to-face in a shocking encounter, both doctor and patient are stricken with shame. But the ultimate horror takes place when, soon after, Lauren’s brutalized corpse is found dumped in an alley. Alex disregards the advice of his trusted friend, LAPD detective Milo Sturgis, and jeopardizes his relationship with longtime lover, Robin Castagna, in order to pursue Lauren’s killer. As he investigates his young patient’s troubled past, Alex enters the shadowy worlds of fringe psychological experimentation and the sex industry–and then into mortal danger, when lust and big money collide in an unforgiving Los Angeles.
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Book 16The Murder Book
by Jonathan Kellerman
Description :
Alex Delaware's relationship with his longterm partner is on the rocks. He is floored when Robin announces she's heading off on a three-month music tour. But he soon has other things to think about. He is sent an envelope with no return address. Inside, he finds an album with gold letters on it - THE MURDER BOOK. It's full of macabre pictures of murders, with brief descriptions of how, and why, the victims died. One picture is marked 'Not solved' - the horrifically mutilated body of a young woman. Unsettled, Alex calls his friend, LAPD detective Milo Sturgis, who seems strangely familiar with the case. What connects the photograph with Milo's past? What's more, why has it been sent to Alex - and by whom?
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Book 17A Cold Heart
by Jonathan Kellerman
Description :
Jonathan Kellerman is a master at creating psychologically nuanced novels of suspense—an author whose name is synonymous with unrelenting action, intriguing plot twists, and penetrating insight into the criminal mind. Now he ventures into bold, new territory with his biggest and best novel yet. A Cold Heart features Kellerman’s brilliant signature style—but in this tour-de-force he mines even deeper the emotional landscape of his characters: psychologist-sleuth Alex Delaware, LAPD homicide detective Milo Sturgis, Milo’s colleague Petra Connor, and Alex’s ex-lover, Robin Castagna—bringing them all vividly to life as never before. “I’ve got a weird one, so naturally I thought of you,” says Milo Sturgis, summoning his friend Alex to the trendy gallery where a promising young artist has been brutally garroted on the night of her first major showing. What makes it “a weird one” is the lack of any obvious motive, and the luridly careful staging of the murder scene—which immediately suggests to Alex not an impulsive crime of passion . . . but the meticulous and taunting modus operandi of a serial killer. Delaware’s suspicion is borne out when he compares notes with Milo’s associate, Petra Connor, and her new partner, a strange, taciturn detective with a past of his own named Eric Stahl. The Hollywood cops are investigating the vicious death of Baby Boy Lee, a noted blues guitarist, fatally stabbed after a late-night set at a local club. What links Baby Boy’s murder with that of painter Juliet Kipper is the shadowy presence of an abrasive fanzine writer. This alias-shrouded critic’s love-the-art/disdain-the-artist philosophy and his morbid fascination with the murders leads Alex and the detectives to suspect they’re facing a new breed of celebrity stalker: one with a fetish for snuffing out rising stars. Tracking down the killer proves to be maddening, with the twisting trail leading from halfway houses to palatial mansions and from a college campus to the last place Alex ever expected: the doorstep of his ex-lover Robin Castagna, whose business association with two of the victims casts her as an unavoidable player in the unfolding case. As more and more killings are discovered, unraveling the maddening puzzle assumes a chilling new importance—stopping a vicious psychopath who’s made cold-blood murder his chosen art form.
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Book 18Therapy
by Jonathan Kellerman
Description :
Jonathan Kellerman has made the psychological thriller his own gripping province with his bestselling series of Alex Delaware novels. Now, Delaware’s new adventure leads the sleuthing psychologist on a harrowing exploration into the realm he knows best: the human psyche, in all its complexity, mystery, and terrifying propensity for darkness. “Been a while since I had me a nice little whodunit,” homicide detective Milo Sturgis tells Alex Delaware. But there’s definitely nothing nice about the brutal tableau behind the yellow crime-scene tape. On a lonely lover’s lane in the hills of Los Angeles, a young couple lies murdered in a car. Each bears a single gunshot wound to the head. The female victim has also been impaled by a metal spike. And that savage stroke of psychopathic fury tells Milo this case will call for more than standard police procedure. As he explains to Delaware, “Now we’re veering into your territory.” It is dark territory, indeed. The dead woman remains unidentified and seemingly unknown to everyone. But her companion has a name: Gavin Quick—and his troubled past eventually landed him on a therapist’s couch. It’s there, on familiar turf, that Delaware hopes to find vital clues. And that means going head-to-head with Dr. Mary Lou Koppel, a popular celebrity psychologist who fiercely guards the privacy of her clients . . . dead or alive. But when there’s another gruesomely familiar murder, Delaware surmises that his investigation has struck a nerve. As he trolls the twisted wreckage of Quick’s tormented last days, what he finds isn’t madness, but the cold-blooded method behind it. And as he follows a chain of greed, corruption, and betrayal snaking hideously through the profession he thought he knew, he’ll discover territory where even he never dreamed of treading. As provocative as it is suspenseful, Therapy is premier Kellerman that finds the award-winning author firing on all creative cylinders—and carrying readers on an electrifying ride to a place only he can take them, for an experience they won’t soon forget.
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Book 19Rage
by Jonathan Kellerman
Description :
In a host of consecutive bestsellers, Jonathan Kellerman has kept readers spellbound with the intense, psychologically acute adventures of Dr. Alex Delaware–and with excursions through the raw underside of L.A. and the coldest alleys of the criminal mind. Rage offers a powerful new case in point, as Delaware and LAPD homicide detective Milo Sturgis revisit a horrifying crime from the past that has taken on shocking and deadly new dimensions. Troy Turner and Rand Duchay were barely teenagers when they kidnapped and murdered a younger child. Troy, a remorseless sociopath, died violently behind bars. But the hulking, slow-witted Rand managed to survive his stretch. Now, at age twenty-one, he’s emerged a haunted, rootless young man with a pressing need: to talk–once again–with psychologist Alex Delaware. But the young killer comes to a brutal end, that conversation never takes place. Has karma caught up with Rand? Or has someone waited for eight patient years to dine on ice-cold revenge? Both seem strong possibilities to Sturgis, but Delaware’s suspicions run deeper . . . and darker. Because fear in the voice of the grownup Rand Duchay–and his eerie final words to Alex: “I’m not a bad person” – betray untold secrets. Buried revelations so horrendous, and so damning, they’re worth killing for. As Delaware and Sturgis retrace their steps through a grisly murder case that devastated a community, they discover a chilling legacy of madness, suicide, and multiple killings left in its wake–and even uglier truths waiting to be unearthed. And the nearer they come to understanding an unspeakable crime, the more harrowingly close they get to unmasking a monster hiding in plain sight. Rage finds Jonathan Kellerman in phenomenal form–orchestrating a relentlessly suspenseful, devilishly unpredictable plot to a finale as stunning and thought-provoking as it is satisfying. From the Hardcover edition.
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Book 20Gone
by Jonathan Kellerman
Description :
No one conducts a more chilling, suspenseful, thoroughly engrossing tour through the winding corridors of criminal behavior and the secret chambers of psychopathology than Jonathan Kellerman, the bestselling “master of the psychological thriller” (People). Now the incomparable team of psychologist Alex Delaware and homicide cop Milo Sturgis embark on their most dangerous excursion yet, into the dark places where risk runs high and blood runs cold. It’s a story tailor-made for the nightly news: Dylan Meserve and Michaela Brand, young lovers and fellow acting students, vanish on the way home from a rehearsal. Three days later, the two of them are found in the remote mountains of Malibu -battered and terrified after a harrowing ordeal at the hands of a sadistic abductor. The details of the nightmarish event are shocking and brutal: The couple was carjacked at gunpoint by a masked assailant and subjected to a horrific regimen of confinement, starvation and assault. But before long, doubts arise about the couple’s story, and as forensic details unfold, the abduction is exposed as a hoax. Charged as criminals themselves, the aspiring actors claim emotional problems, and the court orders psychological evaluation for both. Michaela is examined by Alex Delaware, who finds that her claims of depression and stress ring true enough. But they don’t explain her lies, and Alex is certain that there are hidden layers in this sordid psychodrama that even he hasn’t been able to penetrate. Nevertheless, the case is closed–only to be violently reopened when Michaela is savagely murdered. When the police look for Dylan, they find that he’s gone. Is he the killer or a victim himself? Casting their dragnet into the murkiest corners of L.A., Delaware and Sturgis unearth more questions than answers–including a host of eerily identical killings. What really happened to the couple who cried wolf? And what bizarre and brutal epidemic is infecting the city with terror, madness, and sudden, twisted death? From the Hardcover edition.
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Book 21Obsession
by Jonathan Kellerman
Description :
With scores of millions of books in print, translation into two dozen languages, and one of the most popular heroes in contemporary fiction to his name, #1 New York Times bestselling author Jonathan Kellerman is the unequivocal “master of the psychological thriller” (People). In his newest novel Kellerman delivers a tour de force–poignant, dark, and chilling–that illuminates a shadowy world where impulse rules. Tanya Bigelow was a solemn little girl when Dr. Alex Delaware successfully treated her obsessive-compulsive symptoms. Now, at nineteen, she still seems older than her years–but her problems go beyond hyper-maturity. Patty Bigelow, Tanya’s aunt and adoptive mother, has made a deathbed confession of murder and urged the young woman to seek Delaware’s help. The doctor recalls Patty as a selfless E.R. nurse struggling to raise a child on her own–a woman seemingly incapable of the “terrible thing” she has admitted. But for Tanya’s peace of mind, Delaware agrees to investigate, and he enlists LAPD detective Milo Sturgis in the search for the phantom victim of a crime that may never have occurred. Armed with only the vaguest details, psychologist and cop follow a trail twisting from L.A.’s sleaziest low-rent districts to its overblown mansions, retracing Patty and Tanya’s nomadic and increasingly puzzling life to the doorsteps of a sullen heroin addict; a randy real-estate broker; and a brilliant, enigmatic physics student. Suddenly a very real murder tears open a terrifying tunnel into the past, where secrets–and bodies–are buried. As the tension mounts, Delaware and Sturgis uncover a tangled history of desperation, vengeance, and death–a legacy of evil that refuses to die. Dramatic, action-packed, and filled with the psychological detail that only Jonathan Kellerman can provide, Obsession is a whodunit, a whydunit–and something unique: a did-it-even-happen? This is Kellerman at his heart-racing best.
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Book 22Compulsion
by Jonathan Kellerman
Description :
Once again, the depths of the criminal mind and the darkest side of a glittering city fuel #1 New York Times bestselling author Jonathan Kellerman’s brilliant storytelling. And no one conducts a more harrowing and suspenseful manhunt than the modern Sherlock Holmes of the psyche, Dr. Alex Delaware. A tipsy young woman seeking aid on a desolate highway disappears into the inky black night. A retired schoolteacher is stabbed to death in broad daylight. Two women are butchered after closing time in a small-town beauty parlor. These and other bizarre acts of cruelty and psychopathology are linked only by the killer’s use of luxury vehicles and a baffling lack of motive. The ultimate whodunits, these crimes demand the attention of LAPD detective Milo Sturgis and his collaborator on the crime beat, psychologist Alex Delaware. What begins with a solitary bloodstain in a stolen sedan quickly spirals outward in odd and unexpected directions, leading Delaware and Sturgis from the well-heeled center of L.A. society to its desperate edges; across the paths of commodities brokers and transvestite hookers; and as far away as New York City, where the search thaws out a long-cold case and exposes a grotesque homicidal crusade. The killer proves to be a fleeting shape-shifter, defying identification, leaving behind dazed witnesses and death–and compelling Alex and Milo to confront the true face of murderous madness. From the Trade Paperback edition.
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Book 23Bones
by Jonathan Kellerman
Description :
When it comes to writing deftly layered, tightly coiled novels of suspense, #1 New York Times bestselling author Jonathan Kellerman reigns supreme as “master of the psychological thriller” ( People ). Now, Kellerman has worked his magic again in this chilling new masterpiece. The anonymous caller has an ominous tone and an unnerving message about something “real dead . . . buried in your marsh.” The eco-volunteer on the other end of the phone thinks it’s a prank, but when a young woman’s body turns up in L.A.’s Bird Marsh preserve no one’s laughing. And when the bones of more victims surface, homicide detective Milo Sturgis realizes the city’s under siege to an insidious killer. Milo’s first move: calling in psychologist Alex Delaware. The murdered women are prostitutes–except the most recent victim; a brilliant young musician from the East Coast, employed by a wealthy family to tutor a musical prodigy, Selena Bass seems out of place in the marsh’s grim tableau. Conveniently–perhaps ominously–Selena’s blueblood employers are nowhere to be found, and their estate’s jittery caretaker raises hackles. But Milo’s instincts and Alex’s insight are too well-honed to settle for easy answers, even given the dark secrets in this troubled man’s past. Their investigation unearths disturbing layers–about victims, potential victims, and suspects alike–plunging even deeper into the murky marsh’s enigmatic depths. Bizarre details of the crimes suggest a devilish serial killer prowling L.A.’s gritty streets. But when a new murder deviates from the pattern, derailing a possible profile, Alex and Milo must look beyond the suspicion of madness and consider an even more sinister mind at work. Answers don’t come easy, but the darkest of drives and desires may fuel the most devious of foes. Bones is classic Kellerman–relentlessly peeling back the skin and psyches of its characters and revealing the shadows and sins of the souls beneath. With jolt after jolt of galvanizing suspense, it drives the reader through its twists and turns toward a climax as satisfying as it is shattering.
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Book 24Evidence
by Jonathan Kellerman
Description :
#1 New York Times bestselling author Jonathan Kellerman writes unforgettable tales of crime and detection that expose the shadowy side of glittering Los Angeles. And in Evidence , readers are once again in the dexterous grip of a master storyteller and stylist equally skilled at teasing your brain and taking your breath away. In the half-built skeleton of a monstrously vulgar mansion in one of L.A.’s toniest neighborhoods, a watchman stumbles on the bodies of a young couple–murdered in flagrante and left in a gruesome postmortem embrace. Though he’s cracked some of the city’s worst slayings, veteran homicide cop Milo Sturgis is still shocked at the grisly sight: a twisted crime that only Milo’s killer instincts–and psychologist Alex Delaware’s keen insights–can hope to solve. While the female victim’s identity remains a question mark, her companion is ID’d as eco-friendly architect Desmond Backer, who disdains the sort of grandiose superstructure he’s found dead in. And the late Mr. Backer, it’s revealed was also notorious for his power to seduce women. The rare exception is his ex-boss, Helga Gemein, who’s as indifferent to Desmond’s death as she apparently was to his advances. Though Milo and Alex place her on their short list of suspects, the deeper they dig for clues the longer the list grows. An elusive prince who appears to harbor decidedly American appetites, an eccentric blueblood with an ax to grind, one of Desmond’s restless ex-lovers and her cuckolded husband–all are in the homicidal mix spiced with eco-terrorism, arson, blackmail, conspiracy, and a vendetta that runs deep. But when the investigation veers suddenly in a startling direction, it’s the investigators who may wind up on the wrong end of a cornered predator’s final fury.
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