Savage Spawn (13 page)

Don't miss these thrilling suspense novels from Jonathan Kellerman!

The Murder Book

L.A. psychologist-detective Alex Delaware has received a strange, anonymous package in the mail. Inside is an album filled with gruesome crime-scene photos. When his old friend and colleague, homicide detective Milo Sturgis, views the compendium of death, he is immediately shaken by one of the images: a young woman tortured, strangled, and dumped near a freeway ramp. The murder was one of Milo's first cases as a rookie homicide cop: a vicious killing that he failed to solve-and has haunted him ever since. Now, two decades later, someone has chosen to stir up the past. As Alex and Milo set out to uncover what really happened twenty years ago, their relentless investigation reaches deep into L.A.'s nerve centers of power and wealth-past and present. While peeling back layer after layer of ugly secrets, they discover that the murder of one forgotten girl has chilling ramifications that extend far beyond the tragic loss of a single life.

Flesh and Blood

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 his 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.

Dr. Death

A brutalized corpse discovered in a remote region of the Hollywood Hills plunges psychologist-detective Alex Delaware into a landscape of rage and madness as he struggles to solve this most baffling of homicides.

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 own that threaten to derail the partners' friendship as well as the increasingly complex investigation. With page-turning suspense and vivid portraits of L.A.'s darkest side, perennial bestseller Jonathan Kellerman's latest tale of psychopathology taken to the extreme delivers an unforgettable journey into the most sinister corners of the human mind.

Monster

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. . . .

Billy Straight

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 Petra Connor desperately searches for the murderer, as the media swarms mercilessly around the story, the vicious madman stalks closer to his prey. Only Petra can save Billy. But it will take all her cunning to uncover a child lost in a fierce urban labyrinth—where a killer seems right at home. . . .

Survival of the Fittest

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.

The Clinic

Professor Hope Devane's male-bashing pop-psych bestseller created a storm of controversy on the talk-show circuit. Now she is dead, brutally slashed on a quiet street in one of L.A.'s safest neighborhoods. The LAPD's investigation has gone cold, and homicide detective Milo Sturgis turns to his friend Dr. Alex Delaware for a psychological profile of the victim—and a portrait of a killer.

Hope Devane had very different public and private faces. The killer could be any one of the millions who read her book, or someone from the personal life she kept so carefully separate. As Alex and Milo dig deeper into her shadowy past, they will set an elaborate trap for her killer . . . and reveal the unspeakable act that triggered a dark chain of violence.

The Web

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. 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.

Self-Defense

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.

Bad Love

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.

The Devil's Waltz

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.

Private Eyes

The voice belongs to a woman, but Dr. Alex Delaware remembers a little girl. It is eleven years since seven-year-old Melissa Dickinson dialed the 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.

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 years, 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.

Time Bomb

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. 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—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.

Silent Partner

At a party for a controversial Los Angeles sex therapist, Alex encounters a face from his own past—Sharon Ramson, an exquisite, alluring lover who left him abruptly more that 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 alleyways of the mind, where childhood terrors still hold sway.

The Butcher's Theater

They call the ancient hills of Jerusalem the butcher's theater. Here, upon this bloodstained stage, a faceless killer performs his violent specialty. The first to die brutally is a girl. She is drained of blood, then carefully bathed and shrouded in white. Precisely one week later, a second victim is found.

From the sacred Wailing Wall to monasteries where dark secrets are cloistered, from black-clad Bedouin enclaves to labyrinthine midnight alleys, veteran police inspector Daniel Sharavi and his crack team plunge deep into a city simmering with religious and political passions to hunt for a murderer whose insatiable taste for bloodshed could destroy the delicate balance on which Jerusalem's very survival depends.

Over the Edge

When six young prostitutes are found strangled in Los Angeles, an investigation begins that takes the reader on a wild ride involving powerful families and close friends. Child psychologist Alex Delaware has received a garbled, middle-of-the-night crisis call from an ex-patient. As Dr. Delaware becomes involved, he stumbles on a deep secret, one that has existed for over forty years. Along with detective Milo Sturgis, Delaware is about to find himself on a journey into an unforgettably brutal world of madness and murderous passion.