Overview

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.

Editorial Reviews

Kellerman bares a dark, brooding side of his appealing series' detective, child psychologist Alex Delaware ( Over the Edge ), in this complex tale of guilt, greed and expiation. Although his beloved girlfriend Robin has left him, to find herself, Delaware decides against seeing former lover Sharon Ransom, when she asks to meet. Stricken with guilt when he reads of her suicide the next day, he is driven to understand the circumstances that led to her death. Delaware traces Sharon's life back through their relationship and into the many versions of her childhood he discovers. As grisly murders accrue, he gradually unknots a tangled skein of pornography, blackmail, corporate megalomania, academic pretension, mistaken identity, multiple births and borderline personalities. Aided by his friend, gay LAPD detective Milo Sturgis, he travels from L.A.'s mansion-strewn hills to its seamy underside, from the countryside west of Claremont to the hi-tech desert abode of a Howard Hughes-like recluse, uncovering a generation-spanning web of deception that leaves Delaware as uncertain of his own worth as he is of others.' Kellerman keeps his labyrinthine plot in hand, peopling it with eccentric, memorable characters. 100,000 first printing; $100,000 ad/promo.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc

Author Information

Bio of Jonathan Kellerman

Jonathan Kellerman is one of the world's most popular authors. He has brought his expertise as a clinical psychologist to more than thirty bestselling crime novels, including the Alex Delaware series, The Butcher's Theater, Billy Straight, The Conspiracy Club, Twisted,and True Detectives. With his wife, the novelist Faye Kellerman, he co-authored the bestsellers Double Homicide and Capital Crimes. He is the author of numerous essays, short stories, scientific articles, two children's books, and three volumes of psychology, including Savage Spawn: Reflections on Violent Children, as well as the lavishly illustrated With Strings Attached: The Art and Beauty of Vintage Guitars. He has won the Goldwyn, Edgar, and Anthony awards and has been nominated for a Shamus Award. Jonathan and Faye Kellerman live in California and New Mexico. Their four children include the novelist Jesse Kellerman.