Jonathan Kellerman at Tangled Web UK

Page Updated: 04/02/2008

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Jonathan Kellerman - Page 2

First British Edition Headline (2003)

A Cold Heart

I’ve got a weird one, so naturally I thought of you

LAPD homicide detective Milo Sturgis has summoned his friend, psychologist Alex Delaware, to the fashionable gallery where a promising young artist has been brutally garrotted on the night of her first major showing. What makes it a strange case is the lack of any obvious motive, and the luridly careful staging of the murder scene - which immediately suggests to Alex not an impulsive crime of passion but the meticulous and taunting modus operandi of a serial killer.
Alex’s suspicion is borne out when he compares notes with Milo’s associate, Petra Connor, and her new partner, a strange, taciturn detective with a past of his own named Eric Stahl. The Hollywood cops are investigating the vicious death of Baby Boy Lee, a noted blues guitarist, fatally stabbed after a late-night set at a local club. What links Baby Boy’s murder with that of painter Juliet Kipper is the shadowy presence of an abrasive fanzine writer. This alias-shrouded critic’s love-the-art/disdain-the-artist philosophy and his morbid fascination with the murders leads Alex and the detectives to suspect they’re facing a new breed of celebrity stalker - one with a fetish for killing rising stars, who’s made cold-blooded murder his own chosen art form.

First British Edition Headline (2002)

The Murder Book

The day I got the murder book, I was still thinking about Paris.
Red wine, bare trees, grey river, city of love. Everything that happened there.
Now this.

Alex Delaware’s relationship with his long-term partner, Robin Castagna, is on the rocks. Still reeling from the aftershocks of the murder of one of his young clients, Alex is floored when Robin announces that she is heading off on a three-month music tour in aid of famine and child welfare.
But he soon has other things to think about. In the post, he receives an 8x12 envelope wrapped in coarse blue paper, with no return address. Inside, he finds a three-ring binder with gold letters on it -THE MURDER BOOK. The album is full of macabre pictures of murders, taken at the scene of the crime, with brief descriptions of how, and why, the victims died. But only one picture is marked ‘Not solved’ - the horrifically mutilated body of a young woman, dumped in a ditch on the freeway.
Unsettled, Alex calls his friend, LAPD detective Milo Sturgis, who seems strangely familiar with the case. What is the connection between this photograph and Milo’s past, and could the gruesome collection be the work of a police insider? If so, why has it been sent to Alex - and by whom?
Ingenious, shocking, unpredictable, The Murder Book is a mesmerising masterpiece of suspense fiction that is Jonathan Kellerman at his best.

Paperback - Headline (2002)

First British Edition Null (2001)

Flesh and Blood
Sometimes home is the last place you want to go...
When Alex Delaware first sees Lauren Teague she is a sullen teenager with all the usual problems; bad grades at school, moody, uncommunicative with her parents - which is why they think she needs to see a psychologist. But after only a few sessions, as Alex begins to gain her trust, Lauren abruptly terminates her therapy. Years later, Lauren’s mother is pleading for help once again. Lauren has vanished - and she thinks Alex can find her. He reluctantly agrees to try, but as he starts to investigate Lauren’s troubled past he is drawn into the shadowy worlds of fringe psychological experimentation and LA’s seedy sex industry. Sensing that Lauren’s dark family secrets may hold the key to her disappearance, Alex disregards the advice of his trusted friend, LAPD detective Milo Sturgis, not to get involved. And as his quest for the truth becomes an obsession, he jeopardises his relationship with long-time lover Robin Castagna, and even puts his own life at risk...
Jonathan Kellerman’s LA is evil, seductive, erotic and unforgiving, and Flesh And Blood, with its ingenious plot, unforgettable characters and terrifying climax, is suspense fiction at its finest.

First British Edition Little,Brown (2000)

Dr Death
Dr Death has been brutally murdered and Dr Delaware must find out why.
When Eldon Mate, medical bureaucrat turned self-proclaimed mercy killer is the victim of a grisly Hollywood Hills slaying - hooked up to the macabre ‘Humanitron’ with which he has dispatched dozens of people - veteran LA cop Milo Sturgis is assigned to the case. Baffled, Milo consults his friend, psychologist Alex Delaware, who realises quickly that lack of suspects isn’t the problem - there is an abundance of individuals who might have wished the controversial Mate dead: those whose religious and ethical beliefs cause them to see the ‘Angel of Death’ as the devil incarnate, a disgruntled relative of one of Mate’s ‘travellers’, or as a shadowy FBI agent suggests, a homicidal psychopath with a modus operandi similar to Mate’s killer. Furthermore, Mate’s lawyer has disappeared and the death doctor’s mentally unstable son has been spotted lurking around his father’s home.
If all this were not enough, Alex Delaware must walk an ethical tightrope when his own professional past comes back to haunt him, and he is torn between helping his friend and safeguarding the darkest secrets of his patients. Pressured and in conflict as never before, Delaware finds himself caught up in the middle of his most complex and terrifying case.
Jonathan Kellerman is one of the world’s most consistently bestselling authors and Doctor Death is classic Kellerman - a chilling read, rich with edge-of-the-chair suspense, razor-sharp characterisation, and dark psychological tension that never lets up.

Paperback - Warner (2000)

First British Edition Little,Brown (2000)

Monster
In Jonathan Kellerman's riveting and ingenious new novel, Monster, Dr Alex Delaware faces one of the most grisly and baffling mysteries of his career: how can a non-functional 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.
A minor actor is found dead in the boot of a car, his body sawn in half. Months later a psychologist at a hospital for the criminally insane is discovered murdered and mutilated in an eerily similar way. When reports of an inmate's incoherent ramblings begin to make frightening sense as the predictions of yet more deaths, Delaware and Sturgis are drawn into a web of family secrets, vengeance and manipulation - both inside the asylum and on the streets of Los Angeles, where death, drugs and sex are marketed as commodities. The climactic discovery they make as they race to prevent more killings gives fresh and terrifying meaning to the concept of monstrosity.
With deft characterisation and dazzlingly dark twists of plot, Jonathan Kellerman further enhances his literary position as master of the psychological thriller.
‘A fast, professional read, with strong insights into the quirks of human and criminal nature.' Guardian
'Fast paced and complex, it makes for compulsive reading and Kellerman keeps his audience hooked.' Ireland On Sunday
'Alert, ironic and absorbing, Kellerman not only squares up to the horrors he relates. He also takes out the moral garbage.' The Literary Review