Jonathan Kellerman

Milo and Alex investigate the murders of a young couple murdered in flagrante and left in a gruesome postmortem embrace, found in the half-built skeleton of a monstrously vulgar mansion in one of L.A.'s toniest neighborhoods. The female victim is unknown, the male eco-friendly architect Desmond Backer who disdains the sort of grandiose superstructure he is found in. When the investigation veers suddenly in a startling direction, it's the investigators...

"Los Angeles is a city of stark contrast, the palaces of the affluent coexisting uneasily with the hellholes of the mad and the needy. It is that shadow world and the violence it breeds that draw brilliant psychologist Dr. Alex Delaware and Detective Milo Sturgis into an unsettling case of altruism gone wrong. On a superficially lovely morning a woman shows up for work with her usual enthusiasm. She's the newly hired personal assistant to a handsome,...

Tanya Bigelow was a solemn little girl when Dr. Alex Delaware successfully treated her obsessive-compulsive symptoms. Now, at nineteen, Tanya returns with a curious request: that Delaware investigate her aunt?s deathbed confession of murder. While Delaware doubts that Patty Bigelow was capable of such a horrific act, he agrees to look into the matter. Armed with only the vaguest details, Delaware and LAPD detective Milo Stugris retrace Patty?s and...

MY SISTER?S KEEPER: BERKELEY Some of progressive state representative Davida Grayson?s views have made her unpopular. Although her foes are numerous no one suspects that any buttons Davida might push could evoke deadly force. But now Davida lies brutally murdered in her office, and Berkeley homicide detectives Will Barnes and Amanda Isis must unravel Davida?s complex, before the killer pulls off a repeat performance. MUSIC CITY BREAKDOWN: NASHVILLE...

"Things get personal for Deputy Coroner Clay Edison when a murder hits close to home in this riveting, emotional thriller from the bestselling father-son team who write "brilliant, page-turning fiction" (Stephen King). A raging wildfire. A massive blackout. A wealthy man shot to death in his palatial hilltop home. For Clay Edison, it's all in a day's work. As a deputy coroner, caring for the dead, he speaks for those who cannot speak for themselves....

A resourceful runaway alone in the wilds of Los Angeles, twelve-year-old Billy Straight suddenly witnesses a brutal stabbing in Griffith Park. Fleeing into the night, Billy cannot shake the horrific memory of the savage violence, nor the pursuit of a cold-blooded killer. For wherever Billy turns --- from Hollywood Boulevard to the boardwalks of Venice --- he is haunted by the chuck chuck sound of a knife sinking into flesh. As LAPD homicide detective...

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...

Behind the yellow crime-scene tape, a brutal tableau awaits. On a lonely lovers? lane in the hills of Los Angeles, a young couple lies murdered in a car. Each victim bears a single gunshot wound to the head. Though the female remains unidentified, her male companion has a name?Gavin Quick?and a troubled past that had landed him on a therapist?s couch. It?s there, on familiar turf, that psychologist-sleuth Alex Delaware hopes to find vital clues. And...

The nightmare begins when Alex receives a strange package in the mail with no return address. Inside is an ornate album filled with gruesome crime scene photos?a homicide scrapbook entitled The Murder Book. Alex can find no reason for anyone to send him this compendium of death, but when Milo views the book, he is immediately shaken by one of the images: a young woman, tortured, strangled, and dumped near a freeway ramp. This was one of Milo?s first...

To some, Eldon Mate was evil personified. Others saw the former physician as a saint. But one thing was clear: Dr. Death had snuffed out the lives of dozens of human beings and now someone had turned him into a victim. When Mate is found mutilated in a rented van, harnessed to his own killing machine, Delaware is asked to aid his old friend, homicide cop Milo Sturgis, in the hunt for the death doctor's executioner. But Alex harbors secrets of his...