Alex Delaware

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. In 1985, Jonathan's first novel, WHEN THE BOUGH BREAKS, was published to enormous critical and commercial success and became a New York Times bestseller. BOUGH was also produced as a t.v. movie and won the Edgar Allan Poe and Anthony Boucher Awards for Best First Novel. Since then, Jonathan has published a best-selling crime novel every year, and occasionally, two a year. In addition, he has written and illustrated two books for children and a nonfiction volume on childhood violence, SAVAGE SPAWN (1999.) Though no longer active as a psychotherapist, he is a Clinical Professor of Pediatrics and Psychology at University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine.

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.From the Paperback edition.

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.From the Paperback edition.

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 delivering the enigmatic and haunting message:. "Bad love. Bad love. Don't give me the bad love...". For Alex Delaware, the chant, repeated over and over like a twisted nursery rhyme, 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 trespass outside his home in the middle of the night, a sickening act of vandalism. He has becoine 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. Searching his memory for the phrase "bad love," Alex recalls a symposium he attended over a decade ago commemorating the work of Dr. Andres de Bosch, the celebrated child psychologist who ran a clinic for troubled adolescents. With the help of his friend LAPD detective Milo Sturgis, Alex discovers a seemingly random series of violent deaths - a hit-and-run, a "suicidal" leap from a high rise, and a brutal mutilation-murder - that may somehow be related to de Bosch. As he delves deeper into the history of the clinic, the escalating pattern of violence becomes inescapably clear. And if Alex fails to decipher the twisted logic of the stalker's mind games, he will be the next to die. Taut, penetrating, terrifying, Bad Love is vintage Kellerman.

“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.