Jonathan Kellerman

His Life:

Kellerman also loved playing the guitar and was an inveterate cartoonist. His greatest passion, however, was his love of psychology. "I wanted to be a doctor," Kellerman told Nelson, "but I was less consumed with chemistry than with human nature, why people did things that they did." He attended college at the University of California Los Angeles, receiving his B.A. in 1971. During his time there he worked on the college paper, the Daily Bruin, as an editorial cartoonist, editor, and political satirist. "I did a cartoon a day, five days a week, for four years," he told Nelson. This early experience in journalism fostered an appreciation for deadlines and the regimen of daily creative work. In his senior year, he co-wrote a comic novel with a fellow student who was majoring in film production, and won the Samuel Goldwyn Mayer Writing Award for it. Traditionally, this award is considered to be an entree into the world of Hollywood movies, but Kellerman had no intention of writing for the movie industry, or of having to write as a collaborator, as is demanded by Hollywood. Instead, he decided to go to graduate school at the University of Southern California, major in psychology, and continue to write his own novels.

During his graduate studies, Kellerman met his future wife, Faye Marilyn Marder, who was studying for her doctorate in dentistry. The couple married in 1972, and Faye Kellerman also became a popular mystery writer. After earning his Ph.D. in psychology, Kellerman took a post at the Children's Hospital in Los Angeles in 1975. This began his professional career in psychology, and for over a decade he worked at an inner city hospital with children who had cancer. Two of Kellerman's early nonfiction books are about childhood cancer, one written for professionals and the other for parents coping with this problem. "Anything could happen there--murder, suicide, child abuse, molestations, birth defects and chronic diseases," Kellerman told Nelson. "I mean it was a really tough place." It also gave Kellerman new and unique ideas about life and a wider view of the world. He finally had something he wanted to write about. The author of eight unpublished novels, Kellerman had a decade of clinical work experience, dozens of published professional articles and two published nonfiction works, and the ability to produce a book that would excite his audience.

His Books:

Jonathan Kellerman is the author of numerous psychological mysteries, a dozen of which feature the child psychologist, Alex Delaware. Delaware serves as an alter ego for Kellerman who was a respected clinician and professor for over a decade before becoming a full-time writer. Author of popular and chilling books, Kellerman knows how to build excitement to produce edge-of-your-seat suspense. Because of his training as a psychologist, he understands exactly why readers want to be scared. "We want fear," Kellerman told Catherine M. Nelson in an interview for Armchair Detective, "but we want the resolution. You build up tension and then there's a relief. If there is no resolution, people wouldn't want it. It's like tying a knot around your knee, then it feels so wonderful when you take it off. I know how to create fear, because I'm a coward. I'm afraid of these things, so I write about them."

Among "these things" that Kellerman writes about are child abuse, cancer cures for children, the psychological problems of a child genius, deeply buried family secrets, schoolyard shootings, serial killers, and defendants with deep psychological problems, ample subjects for him to serve up a thrilling brew of one part mystery and one part psychological suspense novel. Although most are set in contemporary Los Angeles, Kellerman's novels have also taken place in Jerusalem and on a Pacific island.

His protagonist, Alex Delaware, "combines the shrewd deductive powers of a Sherlock Holmes with a modern view of man. Kellerman's novels--he averages one a year--are usually on the best-seller lists. His first publication, When the Bough Breaks, won the prestigious Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America.

His writing has earned him over $22 million.

In the classic first Alex Delaware novel, Dr. Morton Handler practiced a strange brand of psychiatry. Among his specialties were fraud, extortion, and sexual manipulation. Handler paid for his sins when he was brutally murdered in his luxurious Pacific Palisades apartment. The police have no leads, but they do have one possible witness: seven-year-old Melody Quinn.

It's psychologist Dr. Alex Delaware's job to try to unlock the terrible secret buried in Melody's memory. But as the sinister shadows in the girl's mind begin to take shape, Alex discovers that the mystery touches a shocking incident in his own past.

In his second novel, Kellerman again used his personal background to provide rich detail for a story of abduction and greed. Five-year-old Woody Swope, gravely ill with cancer, has been kidnapped, and Delaware returns to work with his detective sidekick, Sturgis. During their investigation they encounter several interesting and unappealing creatures including "an odd set of parents and an assortment of badly bent people. "It's a relentlessly intelligent thriller."

In this installment, the third in as many years, Delaware must try to help one of his former teenage patients, now the chief suspect in a series of murders of homosexuals. Called in to evaluate the boy's mental capacity, Delaware is captivated by a story that seems all too real. "Attention to good writing, characters drawn with fine shading, and plausibility of plot ... ensure that this novel won't be put down unfinished," remarked Booklist's Brad Hooper. Petersen, writing in the Chicago Tribune Book World, echoed the sentiment, "You will not be able to stop reading. Kellerman, the novelist, knows what he is doing."

Delaware's ex-girlfriend has apparently committed suicide, but when he investigates the mystery surrounding her death, he discovers Hollywood's unpleasant underground world of pornography. A reviewer for Publishers Weekly wrote, "Kellerman bares a dark, brooding side of his appealing series' detective in this complex tale of guilt, greed, and expiation."

In Time Bomb, Kellerman focuses on the psychological background of a schoolyard sniper. The sniper, a somewhat slow local girl, is shot by the bodyguards of a politician visiting the school. When the girl's father employs Kellerman to do a psychological autopsy to clear his daughter's name, the shrink/sleuth uncovers more trouble than he expects, including a resurgent racist German America Bund.

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, 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.

In this thriller, Kellerman focused on Munchausen's syndrome by proxy, the condition of a parent pretending his or her child is ill to gain attention and sympathy. Delaware is called in to investigate the case, but the perpetrator is unclear. It could be the mother, the father, or even a nurse. The investigation soon blossoms and dovetails into other murders and threats. "Plots, subplots, counterplots, crossing plots--Kellerman uses them all and comes up with a page-turner that will keep fans reading into the wee hours."

In Bad Love, the eighth book of the series, Delaware becomes a target himself when fellow panelists at a psychology conference on corrective therapy begin dying in suspicious accidents. He eventually traces the crimes to a former student at a controversial school for troubled children. 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. Taut, penetrating, terrifying,

In the ninth book of the series, Self-Defense, Kellerman used another headline issue, repressed memory, to weave a plot that "keeps your neurons humming" according to Mark Harris in Entertainment Weekly. However, Harris wondered about the realism of Delaware's character. "If he ever had a cranky day, a panicky moment, a fleeting neurosis, it happened when readers weren't looking," Harris commented.

Kellerman left the familiar districts of California behind for an adventure on a Pacific Island in The Web. Booklist's Melton enthused, "Kellerman's done it again!" and went on to praise the "intriguing, keep-'em-guessing plot," the "usual mix of psychologically fascinating characters," and "a megadose of suspense [that] makes this one a must-have for all mystery collections.

Political correctness, sexual harassment, and male bashing are the subjects of The Clinic. Alex Delaware is back in Los Angeles helping to investigate the murder of Dr. Hope Devane, a university psychologist and well known author of a best-selling book on predatory men. For three months the police found no clues to the murder of Hope Devane, psychology professor and controversial author of a pop-psych bestseller about men. She was found stabbed to death on a quiet, shaded street in one of L.A.'s best neighborhoods. The evidence suggested not random slaughter, but cold, calculated stalking. And the list of potential suspects was as extensive as the audience for her book and her talk show appearances.

Delaware is aiding Milo Sturgis in a homicide investigation with a cold trail. 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?

In his twelfth Delware book, Delaware is in "top form". The novel is about the murder of a young doctor who worked at a hospital for the criminally insane. The monster of the title is a mentally deficient inmate of the hospital who brutally killed two people many years before. "Kellerman delivers another chilling look into the dark corners of the human psyche."

When Dr. Eldon Mate, a passionate advocate of physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia, is found dead, murdered by one of his own death machines, LAPD homicide detective Milo Sturgis and his friend Dr. Alex Delaware are on the case.

When beautiful, defiant teen, Lauren Teague is brought to Dr. Alex Delaware's office by her parents, but she angrily resists his help. Years later, Lauren and Alex come face to face in a shocking encounter. When Lauren's corpse is found dumped in an alley, Alex disregards the advice of his friend, LAPD detective Milo Sturgis, to pursue Lauren's killer.

The nightmare begins when Alex receives a strange package in the mail with no return address. Inside is an ornate album filled with gruesome crime scene photos—a homicide scrapbook entitled The Murder Book. Alex can find no reason for anyone to send him this compendium of death, but when Milo views the book, he is immediately shaken by one of the images: a young woman, tortured, strangled, and dumped near a freeway ramp. This was one of Milo’s first cases as a rookie homicide cop: a vicious killing that he failed to solve. Now, two decades later, Alex and Milo set out to uncover what really happened twenty years ago.

In his first non-Delaware thriller, The Butcher's Theater, Kellerman focuses on a serial killer in Jerusalem who mutilates the bodies of young Arab women, dumping them in the hills around the city and further fueling the already tense situation between Jews and Arabs. Israeli police inspector Daniel Sharavi has to track down the killer while navigating the turbulent political waters stirred up by the killings. Alex

Kellerman employs a female homicide detective, Petra Connor. She searches for a runaway boy who has witnessed a brutal murder in a Los Angeles park. The case becomes a media event when it becomes known that the victim was the former wife of a popular television star. The winsome title character ... a self-taught street kid with an artless affection for books [is why] you're turning the pages so fast.

Delaware is called in to consult on a string of bizarre murders of fringe artists on the verge of stardom. Their only connection, as Delaware shrewdly notes, is that each is "[a] gifted, damaged soul snuffed out violently, during the first blush of comeback." Rounding out the investigative team is Det. Petra Connor (reprising her role from previous Kellerman books), this time paired with spooky, skinny Eric Stahl, a silent ex-soldier with a sweaty fear of hospitals.

When his brief, passionate romance with nurse Jocelyn Banks is cut short by her kidnapping and brutal murder, Dr. Jeremy Carrier is left emotionally devastated, haunted by his lover's grisly demise and warily eyed by police still seeking a prime suspect in the unsolved slaying. To escape the pain, he buries himself in his work as staff psychologist at City Central Hospital-only to be drawn deeper into a waking nightmare when more women turn up murdered in the same gruesome fashion as Jocelyn Banks . . . and the suspicion surrounding Jeremy intensifies. Now, the only way to prove his innocence and put his torment to rest is to follow the trail of a cunning psychopath.

To help solve a young couple's murder, Alex Delaware needs to dig secrets out of a testy celebrity psychologist. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

A year has passed since the Cold Heart murders and Detective Petra Connor is, once again, working Hollywood Homicide solo. She has just solved three gang-related killings and is feeling pretty good about herself - about life in general - when Isaac Gomez waltzes into her office and tells her he's found something she might want to take a look at. A twenty-two-year-old prodigy researching a Ph.D. in sociology, Isaac has gained access to LAPD case files. But while combing the files, the brilliant young man has come upon a series of apparently unrelated murders all committed shortly after midnight on the exact same date: June 28. Can this be purely coincidence? As Petra's curiosity leads her to investigate further, she becomes convinced that something evil has managed to conceal itself within the dry pages of the cold-case files. Killings so diabolical and meticulously constructed that they would have remained invisible but for the probing mind of a young, naive genius. To make matters worse, June 28 is only a month away...

Troy Turner and Rand Duchay were barely teenagers when they kidnapped and murdered a younger child. Troy, a remorseless sociopath, died violently behind bars. But the hulking, slow-witted Rand managed to survive his stretch. Now, at age twenty-one, he's emerged a haunted, rootless young man with a pressing need: to talk-once again-with psychologist Alex Delaware. But the young killer comes to a brutal end, that conversation never takes place. Has karma caught up with Rand? Or has someone waited for eight patient years to dine on ice-cold revenge? Both seem strong possibilities to Sturgis, but Delaware's suspicions run deeper . . . and darker. Because fear in the voice of the grownup Rand Duchay-and his eerie final words to Alex: "I'm not a bad person"-betray untold secrets. Buried revelations so horrendous, and so damning, they're worth killing for. As Delaware and Sturgis retrace their steps through a grisly murder case that devastated a community, they discover a chilling legacy of madness, suicide, and multiple killings left in its wake-and even uglier truths waiting to be unearthed. And the nearer they come to understanding an unspeakable crime, the more harrowingly close they get to unmasking a monster hiding in plain sight.

No one conducts a more chilling, suspenseful, thoroughly engrossing tour through the winding corridors of criminal behavior and the secret chambers of psychopathology than Jonathan Kellerman, the bestselling “master of the psychological thriller” (People). Now the incomparable team of psychologist Alex Delaware and homicide cop Milo Sturgis embark on their most dangerous excursion yet, into the dark places where risk runs high and blood runs cold.

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. The couple was carjacked at gunpoint by a masked assailant and subjected to a horrific regimen of confinement, starvation and assault. But before long, doubts arise about the couple's story, and as forensic details unfold, the abduction is exposed as a hoax. Charged as criminals themselves, the aspiring actors claim emotional problems, and the court orders psychological evaluation for both.

Michaela is examined by Alex Delaware, who finds that her claims of depression and stress ring true enough. But they don't explain her lies, and Alex is certain that there are hidden layers in this sordid psychodrama that even he hasn't been able to penetrate.

Where there is life there is devotion. Where there is death there is obsession. Patty Bigelow thought she'd finally figured life out. Then her wayward sister Leila abandons her child, Tanya, on her doorstep. The aunt and troubled niece slowly learn to live together, with the help of Dr Alex Delaware's counselling. Now, fifteen years later, Tanya is back in Alex's office, a self-possessed Harvard student, about to enter graduate school in clinical psychology. Patty - the only real mother she's ever known - has died and left Tanya with a chilling legacy: a deathbed confession that her aunt murdered a man years earlier. Tanya has tried to let go of the confession. But it soon becomes clear that nothing short of finding out the truth will do. And she needs Alex's help ...