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.

Psychologist Dr. Alex Delaware confronts a killer who takes as much pleasure in matching wits with the police as in robbing human life. A diplomat's retarded daughter is murdered on a school field trip. The girl's father denies the possibility of a political motive, leaving LAPD detective Milo Sturgis and his longtime friend, Alex Delaware, stymied. When another killing occurs, Alex finds himself ensnared in one of the most menacing cases of his career.

It came in a plain brown wrapper, no return address: an audiocassette of a soul-lacerating scream, followed by an enigmatic, haunting message delivered in a childlike voice: "Bad love. Bad love. Don't give me the bad love." For psychologist-detective Dr. 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. If Alex fails to decipher the twisted logic of the stalker's mind games, he will be the next to die.

Alex Delaware is back! And in Jonathan Kellerman's riveting and ingenious new novel, Monster, he faces one of the most grisly and baffling mysteries of his career: How can a nonfunctional psychotic locked up in a supposedly secure institution for homicidal madmen predict brutal murders in the outside world? Delaware and his friend and partner Detective Milo Sturgis must penetrate this enigma in order to stop the horrific killings.

Perennial and acknowledged master of the psychological thriller Jonathan Kellerman has created a riveting and memorable Alex Delaware novel about a troubled and elusive young woman whose brutal murder forces the brilliant psychologist-detective to confront his own fallibility.

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.

In 17 consecutive best selling novels, Jonathan Kellerman has proven himself the master of the psychological thriller. Now, in Kellerman's most compelling novel yet, LA 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.

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....

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.

Alex Delaware is summoned to a trendy gallery where a promising young artist has been brutally garroted on the night of her first major showing. There is no obvious motive, and the careful staging of the murder scene immediately suggests to Alex not an impulsive crime of passion, but the meticulous and taunting modus operandi of a serial killer. As more killings are discovered, unraveling the puzzle assumes a new importance - stopping a vicious psychopath who's made cold-blooded murder his chosen art form.

"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.

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.

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. Wooed by a high-powered attorney to build a defense, Alex will get a chance to do what he couldn't five years ago.

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.