Alex Delaware (abridged)

Jonathan Kellerman has gained a loyal legion of fans with his best selling series of thrillers featuring child psychologist Alex Delaware. In When the Bough Breaks - the novel that started it all - Delaware is irresistably drawn to the case of a terrified child who is the only witness in a horrific double murder.

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.

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.

The best-selling author of When The Bough Breaks, Blood Test, and Over The Edge delivers the most stunning novel yet, 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 she desperately needs help, but Alex evades her. The next day she is dead, an apparent suicide.

The voice belongs to a woman, but Dr. Alex Delaware remembers a little girl. It is 11 years since seven-year-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 the psychologist's help once more. Only this time it looks like Melissa's deepest childhood nightmare is really coming true....

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.

Three months ago, Hope Devane was found stabbed to death on a quiet, shady street in one of LA's safest neighborhoods. The police have found no clues to her murder. Now Detective Milo Sturgis, newly assigned to the case, turns to his psychologist friend, Dr. Alex Delaware, looking for insights into Hope's life. She was a psychology professor and controversial author of a pop-psych best seller, an angry indictment of men. Both Milo and Alex believe Hope's murder to be an execution fueled by hate.

When the slightly retarded 15-year-old daughter of a diplomat is murdered in cold blood on school field trip in the Santa Monica Mountains, her father adamantly denies the possibility of a political motive. The Los Angeles Police Department's Detective Milo Sturgis and his longtime friend, psychologist Alex Delaware, pose the question: Why?

Jonathan Kellerman's LA is evil, seductive, erotic, and unforgiving, and Flesh and Blood is mind-opening in its drama of a driven man's personal quest, breathtaking in its ingenious plot, filled with unforgettable characters, and topped off by a terrifying climax. This is suspense fiction as its best.

Jonathan Kellerman has distinguished himself as the master of the psychological thriller. Now L.A. psychologist-detective Alex Delaware confronts a long-unsolved murder of unspeakable brutality - an ice-cold case whose resolution threatens his survival, and that of longtime friend, homicide detective, Milo Sturgis.

"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.

"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.

In a host of consecutive best sellers, Jonathan Kellerman has kept readers spellbound with the intense, psychologically acute adventures of Dr. Alex Delaware. 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.

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.

Tanya Bigelow was a solemn little girl when Dr. Alex Delaware successfully treated her obsessive-compulsive symptoms. Now, at 19, 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.

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 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.

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.

Her name is Elise Freeman, and her chilling cry for help to whoever may be listening comes too late to save her. On a DVD found near her lifeless body, the emotionally and physically battered woman chronicles a year-and-a-half-long ordeal of monstrous abuse at the hands of three sadistic tormentors. But even more shocking than the lurid details is the revelation that the offenders, like their victim, are teachers at one of L.A.s most prestigious prep schools.