Mostrando resultados por autor "Jonathan Kellerman" en Todas las categorías

In Los Angeles, the law is anything other than an open-and-shut matter. There are those who think it's flexible, and those who strive to enforce it above all else. A young woman is found dead at her kitchen table and the DNA on the cigarette butts in the ashtray in front of her belongs to her ex-boyfriend, who has a record. This is a case Milo and Alex call open and shut, but the guy has an airtight alibi. Could an enemy from his shady past have framed him?

People come to Los Angeles to chase their dreams. Sometimes they find themselves cast into a nightmare. And sometimes, the most ardent dreamers turn out to be the most vicious monsters. The body of an aspiring actress is found dumped near a hospital emergency room. She’s been drugged and murdered and the motive for the callous crime remains maddeningly out of reach. Until, a prime suspect materializes. Another Hollywood hopeful. Only to be shot dead by a sniper using a weapon that turns out to have been catalogued in a previous murder. And another, before that.

Eccentric, reclusive Walter Rennert lies cold at the bottom of his stairs. At first glance the scene looks straightforward: a once-respected psychology professor done in by booze and a bad heart. But his daughter, Tatiana, insists that her father has been murdered, and she persuades Clay Edison to take a closer look at the grim facts of Rennert's life. What emerges is a history of scandal and violence and an experiment gone horribly wrong that ended in the brutal murder of a coed.

Brilliant, beautiful, and stunningly effective, psychologist Dr. Grace Blades has a special gift for treating troubled souls and healing tormented psyches - perhaps because she bears her own invisible scars. Only five years old when she witnessed her parents die in a bloody murder-suicide, Grace took refuge in her towering intellect and found comfort in the loving couple who adopted her. But as an adult, Grace's accomplished professional life vies with a covert, high-risk dark side, played out harrowingly. And when Grace's two worlds shockingly converge, her past returns with a vengeance.

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.

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 LA'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.

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 and Alex began his therapy sessions with the traumatized children, he couldn't escape the image of a slight teenager clutching an oversized rifle.

A new patient, 24-year-old Lucy Lowell, has come to the semi-retired psychologist Alex Delaware, straight from the jury of a serial killer's grisly trial. The trial was harrowing enough, but now it's triggered a recurring and haunting dream in which Lucy, as a little girl, watches a gang of men bury a young woman's body in the woods.

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....

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. The ultimate whodunits, these crimes demand the attention of LAPD detective Milo Sturgis and his collaborator on the crime beat, psychologist Alex Delaware.

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.

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.

LAPD Lieutenant Milo Sturgis is a fine homicide detective, but when he needs to get into the mind of a killer, he leans on the expertise of his best friend, the brilliant psychologist Dr. Alex Delaware. While Sturgis has a knack for piecing together the details of a crime, Delaware can decipher the darkest intents driving the most vicious of perpetrators. And there’s no better place for the doctor’s analytical skills to shine than a rowdy hall full of young men and women intoxicated on life and lust...and suddenly faced with the specter of death.

The City of Angels has more than its share of psychopaths, and no one recognizes that more acutely than the brilliant psychologist and police consultant Dr. Alex Delaware. Despite that, Constance Sykes, a sophisticated, successful physician, hardly seems like someone Alex needs to fear. Then, at the behest of the court, he becomes embroiled in a bizarre child custody dispute initiated by Connie against her sister and begins to realize that there is much about the siblings he has failed to comprehend.

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 Mate's own suicide van, hooking him 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 Dr. Alex Delaware.

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.

Cut loose from his former life at the coroner’s office, Clay Edison has set up shop as a private investigator. It’s steady, safe work. Until it isn’t. The trouble begins when a young man, tasked with managing his grandmother’s estate, hires Clay to examine some minor financial discrepancies. What starts off as a case of simple fraud rapidly explodes into a web of deception, an elaborate con game stretching back decades and involving countless victims. All the evidence points to a tiny town on California’s rugged, remote Lost Coast.

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. 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.

Twelve-year-old Billy Straight - precocious, heartbreakingly perceptive, relentlessly moral - has fled the chaos and abuse of his life at home and is fighting to survive on L.A.'s meanest streets. All alone, Billy has fashioned a precarious existence for himself, using principled tricks to nourish his body and his mind. Late one night he watches from his hiding place as a man viciously butchers a woman. Billy becomes the center of terrifying attention - from the media, from violent bounty hunters, and from the murderer himself.

For three months, the police find no clues in the stabbing death of Hope Devane, the author of a pop-psychology best-seller. So they turn to Dr. Alex Delaware to study the case for insights that might point to a killer. As Alex unlocks the private compartments of Hope's life, the murder looks calculated and vengeful. A study of her childhood reveals that she kept secrets from everyone. It also helps Alex set a trap for the killer.