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.

The anonymous caller has an ominous tone and an unnerving message about something "real dead...buried in your marsh." The eco-volunteer on the other end of the phone thinks it's a prank, but when a young woman's body turns up in LA's Bird Marsh preserve no one's laughing. And when the bones of more victims surface, homicide Detective Milo Sturgis realizes the city's under siege to an insidious killer. Milo's first move: calling in psychologist Alex Delaware.

It is a case unlike any psychologist Dr. Alex Delaware has ever encountered. Five-year-old Woody Swope is ill, but the real problem is his parents. They refuse to agree to the one treatment that could save this boy's life. Alex sets out to convince Mr. and Mrs. Swope - only to find that the parents have left the hospital and taken their son with them. Worse, the sleazy motel room where the Swopes were staying is empty - except for the ominous bloodstain. The Swopes and their son have vanished into the sordid shadows of the city.

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.

In the half-built skeleton of a monstrously vulgar mansion in one of L.A.'s toniest neighborhoods, a watchman stumbles on the bodies of a young couple - murdered in flagrante and left in a gruesome postmortem embrace. Though he's cracked some of the city's worst slayings, veteran homicide cop Milo Sturgis is still shocked at the grisly sight: a twisted crime that only Milo's killer instincts - and psychologist Alex Delaware's keen insights - can hope to solve.

At 40, Patty Bigelow thought she'd finally figured life out. Then her wayward sister Leila abandons her child, Tanya, on Patty's doorstep. The aunt and troubled niece slowly learn to live together, with the help of Dr Alex Delaware's counseling. Now, 15 years later, Tanya is back in Alex's office. Patty has died and left Tanya with a chilling legacy: a deathbed confession that her aunt murdered a man years earlier.

At 5 a.m. in the upscale neighbourhood of Westwood Village, two removal men are making a routine pick-up when they make a fatal hit. It's a man - who appeared from nowhere - naked and with no means of identification. Not long after, a woman is found dead in a house nearby, which neighbours suspect to be a brothel. Could the man have come from there? When LAPD homicide lieutenant Milo Sturgis calls brilliant psychologist Alex Delaware is called to the scene, the case gets even more complicated. 

Alex Delaware returns in a thrilling new case featuring one of the most devious murderers ever conceived by New York Times number-one best seller Jonathan Kellerman. Even hundreds of closed cases to his credit can't keep LAPD lieutenant Milo Sturgis from agonising over the crimes that don't get solved--and the victims who go without justice. Victims like Katherine Hennepin, a young woman strangled and stabbed in her home.

Dylan Meserve and Michaela Brand, young lovers and fellow acting students, vanish on the way home from a rehearsal. Three days later, they are found in the remote mountains of Malibu, battered and terrified. They've had a harrowing ordeal: held at gunpoint by a sadistic abductor who subjected them to a horrific regime of confinement, starvation, and assault. But doubts arise about their story and, as forensic details unfold, the abduction is exposed as a hoax.

A brilliant criminal psychologist, Alex works with the police to help solve the most complex of crimes in Los Angeles, city of illusions, glamour and infamy. An affluent family returns home from Sunday dinner only to find the murdered and brutalised corpse of a total stranger in their house. This baffling, twisted tale tests Alex and Milo to their intellectual and emotional limits.

Not since Jack the Ripper has there been such a gruesome crime scene. One look at the victim's apartment turned charnel house is enough for Milo Sturgis to summon The Crime Reader. But even Alex Delaware's skills may be stymied when more slayings occur in the same ghastly fashion... with no apparent connection between them.

Ellie Barker is a self-made millionaire by the age of 40 and is obsessed with reopening the coldest of cases: the decades-old death of the mother she never knew. She hires LAPD Homicide Lieutenant Milo Sturgis to help. Twenty-five years ago Ellie's mother was found with a bullet in her head in a torched Cadillac that has overturned on infamously treacherous Mulholland Drive. No physical evidence, no witnesses, no apparent motive. And a slew of detectives have already worked the job and failed.

When a young couple takes possession of their dream home, they can't wait to remodel the neglected mansion. That is until they make a gruesome discovery of a rusted metal strongbox containing two rotting leather doctor's bags. And inside each bag, swaddled in sheets of 60-year-old newspaper, lies a tiny human skeleton. The case hits the media, and theories abound. The most likely culprit is a mysterious woman, employed as private nurse to wealthy L.A. families during World War Two.

At nearly 100 years old, Thalia Mars is a far cry from the patients child psychologist Alex Delaware normally treats. But the charming, witty woman convinces Alex to meet with her in a suite at the Aventura, a luxury hotel with a checkered history. What Thalia wants from Alex are answers to unsettling questions about guilt, patterns of criminal behavior, victim selection. When Alex asks the reason for her morbid fascination, Thalia promises to tell all during their next session.