Jonathan Kellerman

Jonathan Kellerman

When Jonathan Kellerman was attending UCLA he worked his way through as an editorial cartoonist, freelance musician and editor. In his senior year, he won an award for his fiction writing. Kellerman went on to earn a Ph.D. in psychology, with a specialty in pediatric psychology. He has conducted research on the psychological effects of extreme isolation on pediatric cancer patients. That study led to the first comprehensive approach to treating the emotional as well as physical aspects of children with cancer.

His first fiction novel, “When the Bough Breaks”, was a huge critical and commercial success. Since then, he has written a bestselling novel a year as well as two children’s books and a nonfiction work on childhood violence.

He is married to Faye Kellerman, a bestselling novelist herself. They have four children. He still serves as the Clinical Professor of Pediatrics and Psychology at University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine.

Book List in Order: 50 titles

  • Unnatural History

    • / Police/Detective/Law Enforcement
    • Buy Buy

    The most enduring detectives in American crime fiction are back in this electrifying thriller of art and brutality from the #1 New York Times bestselling master of suspense.Los Angeles is a city of stark contrast, the palaces of the affluent coexisti...

  • City of the Dead

    • / Police/Detective/Law Enforcement
    • Buy Buy

    The past comes back to haunt psychologist Alex Delaware and Detective Milo Sturgis when they investigate a grisly double homicide and uncover an even more unspeakable motive in this riveting thriller from the #1 New York Times bestselling master of s...

  • Serpentine

    • / Police/Detective/Law Enforcement
    • Buy Buy

    Psychologist Alex Delaware and detective Milo Sturgis search for answers to a brutal, decades-old crime in this electrifying psychological thriller from the #1 New York Times bestselling master of suspense. LAPD homicide lieutenant Milo Sturgis is...

  • The Museum of Desire

    • / Police/Detective/Law Enforcement
    • Buy Buy

    Psychologist Alex Delaware and detective Milo Sturgis struggle to make sense of a seemingly inexplicable massacre in this electrifying psychological thriller from the #1 New York Times bestselling master of suspense. LAPD Lieutenant Milo Sturgis h...

  • The Wedding Guest

    • / Police/Detective/Law Enforcement
    • Buy Buy

    Psychologist Alex Delaware and Detective Milo Sturgis dig into a shocking crime at a raucous wedding reception in this gripping psychological thriller from the #1 New York Times bestselling master of suspense. In the middle of a “Saints and Sinn...

  • Night Moves

    • / Police/Detective/Law Enforcement
    • Buy Buy

    Even with all his years of experience, LAPD homicide detective Milo Sturgis knows there are crimes his skill and savvy cannot solve alone. That’s when he calls on brilliant psychologist Alex Delaware to read between the lines, where the darkest mot...

  • Heartbreak Hotel

    • / Police/Detective/Law Enforcement
    • Buy Buy

    Alex Delaware and LAPD detective Milo Sturgis investigate the death of Alex’s most mysterious patient to date in the sensational new thriller from the master of suspense, #1 New York Times bestselling author Jonathan Kellerman. At nearly one hun...

  • Breakdown

    • / Police/Detective/Law Enforcement
    • Buy Buy

    Bestselling author Jonathan Kellerman has been universally hailed as the master of psychological suspense, and the blockbuster new thriller featuring Alex Delaware and Milo Sturgis confirms his status as today’s preeminent practitioner of saber-sha...

  • The Murderer's Daughter

    Brilliant, beautiful, and stunningly effective, psychologist Dr. Grace Blades has a special gift for treating troubled souls and healing tormented psyches -- perhaps because she bears her own invisible scars. Only five years old when she witnessed he...




  • The Right Thing to Do: A Novella

    #1 New York Times bestselling author Jonathan Kellerman heralds the arrival of his thrilling new stand-alone novel, The Murderer’s Daughter, with this eBook original prequel short story—a powerful portrait of a young man seeking his destiny, who ...

  • Motive

    • / Police/Detective/Law Enforcement
    • Buy Buy

    The #1 New York Times bestselling author Jonathan Kellerman writes razor-sharp novels that cut to the quick. Now comes Motive, which pits psychologist Alex Delaware and homicide cop Milo Sturgis against a vicious criminal mind -- the kind only Keller...

  • Killer

    • / Police/Detective/Law Enforcement
    • Buy Buy

    After thirty-five riveting, internationally acclaimed novels of psychological suspense, #1 New York Times bestselling author Jonathan Kellerman returns with his most stunning thriller to date. Killer is a mesmerizing L.A. noir portrayal of the darkes...

  • Guilt

    • / Police/Detective/Law Enforcement
    • Buy Buy

    In an upscale L.A. neighborhood. a backyard renovation unearths an infant's body, buried sixty years ago. Soon thereafter, in a nearby park, another disturbingly bizarre discovery is made not far from the body of a young woman shot in the head. Helpi...

  • Victims

    • / Police/Detective/Law Enforcement
    • Buy Buy

    Acid-tongued Vita Berlin hadn't a friend in the world, but whom did she cross so badly as to end up meticulously arranged in such a gruesome murder scene? One look prompts LAPD detective Milo Sturgis to summon his expert in homicidal maniacs, Alex De...

  • Mystery

    • / Police/Detective/Law Enforcement
    • Buy Buy

    The closing of the grand old Fauborg Hotel in Beverly Hills is a sad occasion for longtime patrons Alex Delaware and Robin Castagna, who go there one last time for cocktails. But even more poignant -- and curious -- is a striking young woman in elega...

  • Deception

    • / Police/Detective/Law Enforcement
    • Buy Buy

    Her name is Elise Freeman, and her chilling cry for help comes too late to save her. On a DVD found near her lifeless body, the emotionally and physically battered woman chronicles a long ordeal of abuse at the hands of three sadistic tormentors. But...

  • Evidence

    • / Police/Detective/Law Enforcement
    • Buy Buy

    In a half-built mansion in Los Angeles, a watchman stumbles onto the bodies of a young couple -- murdered and left in a gruesome postmortem embrace. Veteran homicide cop Milo Sturgis is shocked at the sight: a twisted crime that only Milo and psychol...

  • True Detectives

    • / Police/Detective/Law Enforcement
    • Buy Buy

    Moses Reed and Aaron Fox have the same mother; their respective fathers were cops, friends, and partners. And despite their shared calling, their turbulent family history has set them at odds. Moses is a no-frills LAPD detective; Aaron is a smooth-ta...

  • Bones

    • / Police/Detective/Law Enforcement
    • Buy Buy

    The anonymous caller has an unnerving message about something "real dead .. . buried in your marsh." The eco-volunteer on the other end of the line thinks it's a prank, but when a young woman's body turns up in L.A.'s Bird Marsh preserve, no one's la...




  • Compulsion

    • / Police/Detective/Law Enforcement
    • Buy Buy

    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 curious fact that...

  • Capital Crimes

    Internationally bestselling husband and wife Jonathan and Faye Kellerman team up for a powerful one-two punch with Capital Crimes, a gripping pair of original crime thrillers.MY SISTER’S KEEPER: BERKELEYSome of progressive state representative Davi...

  • Obsession

    • / Police/Detective/Law Enforcement
    • Buy Buy

    Tanya Bigelow was a solemn little girl when Dr. Alex Delaware successfully treated her obsessive-compulsive symptoms. Now, at nineteen, Tanya returns with a curious request: that Delaware investigate her aunt's deathbed confession of murder. While De...

  • Music City Breakdown

    in Capital Crimes
    • / Police/Detective/Law Enforcement
    • Buy Buy

    Detective team Baker Southerby and Lamar Van Gundy understand the rhythms of the music biz as intimately as the streets they work. But when rock legend Jack Jeffries ends up in a ditch with his throat slashed, they find out just how high the price of...

  • Gone

    • / Police/Detective/Law Enforcement
    • Buy Buy

    Missing acting students Dylan and Michaela are found in the remote mountains of Malibu, battered and terrified after a harrowing ordeal at the hands of a sadistic abductor. But forensic evidence soon exposes the incident as a hoax, and the kids are c...

  • Rage

    • / Police/Detective/Law Enforcement
    • Buy Buy

    Troy Turner and Rand Duchay were barely teenagers when they murdered a younger child. While Troy died violently behind bars, the hulking, slow-witted Rand managed to survive his stretch. Now, at age twenty-one, he's emerged a haunted, rootless man wi...

  • Twisted

    • / Police/Detective/Law Enforcement
    • Buy Buy

    With her energies focused on a baffling, vicious gang slaying and her personal life in shambles, Hollywood homicide detective Petra Connor has a full plate. The last thing she needs is a whiz-kid grad student claiming to have stumbled upon a bizarre ...

  • Double Homicide

    DOUBLE HOMICIDE: BOSTON After a basketball match leads to a fatal shooting, Detectives Dorothy Breton and Michael McCain are looking to make an open-and-shut case. For Dorothy, who knows the victim's mother, the crime hits close to home. And for Mic...

  • Therapy

    • / Police/Detective/Law Enforcement
    • Buy Buy

    Behind the yellow crime-scene tape,-a brutal tableau awaits. On a lonely lovers' lane in the hills of Los Angeles, a young couple lies murdered in a car. Each victim bears a single gunshot wound to the head. Though the female remains unidentified, he...

  • The Conspiracy Club

    When his passionate romance with nurse Jocelyn Banks is cut short by her kidnapping and brutal murder, young psychologist Jeremy Carrier is left emotionally devastated, haunted by his lover's grisly demise-and eyed warily by police still seeking a pr...




  • A Cold Heart

    • / Police/Detective/Law Enforcement
    • Buy Buy

    LAPD homicide detective Milo Sturgis summons his friend, psychologist-sleuth Alex Delaware, to a trendy gallery where a promising young artist has been brutally garroted on the night of her first major showing. The details of the murder scene immedia...

  • The Murder Book

    • / Police/Detective/Law Enforcement
    • Buy Buy

    L.A. psychologist-detective Alex Delaware has received a strange, anonymous package in the mail. Inside is an album filled with gruesome crime-scene photos. When his old friend and colleague, homicide detective Milo Sturgis, views the compendium of d...

  • Flesh and Blood

    • / Police/Detective/Law Enforcement
    • Buy Buy

    Lauren Teague is a beautiful, defiant, borderline delinquent teenager when her parents bring her to Dr. Alex Delaware's office. Lauren angrily resists Alex's help -- and the psychologist is forced to chalk Lauren up as one of the inevitable failures ...

  • Dr. Death

    • / Police/Detective/Law Enforcement
    • Buy Buy

    A brutalized corpse discovered in a remote region of the Hollywood Hills plunges psychologist-detective Alex Delaware into a landscape of rage and madness as he struggles to solve this most baffling of homicides. To some, Eldon Mate was evil perso...

  • Monster

    • / Police/Detective/Law Enforcement
    • Buy Buy

    A second-rate actor is found mutilated in a car trunk. Then a psychologist at a Los Angeles hospital for the criminally insane is murdered in a similar grisly fashion. Suddenly the incoherent ramblings of an inmate at the presumably secure institutio...

  • Diagnosis Dead

    Mystery stories by such authors as Max Allan Collins, Jeremiah Healy, Carolyn Wheat, Faye Kellerman, and Nancy Pickard ...

  • Billy Straight

    • / Police/Detective/Law Enforcement
    • Buy Buy

    A resourceful runaway alone in the wilds of Los Angeles, twelve-year-old Billy Straight suddenly witnesses a brutal stabbing in Griffith Park. Fleeing into the night, Billy cannot shake the horrific memory of the savage violence, nor the pursuit of a...

  • Survival of the Fittest

    • / Police/Detective/Law Enforcement
    • Buy Buy

    When a slightly retarded fifteen-year-old girl dies on a school trip, LAPD detective Milo Sturgis and his friend psychologist Alex Delaware are stumped. There's no sign of a struggle and no evidence of sexual assault. Just an innocent young girl--dea...

  • The Clinic

    • / Police/Detective/Law Enforcement
    • Buy Buy

    Upon his return to Los Angeles from a harrowing adventure in the South Pacific, Alex is called upon by his friend Milo Sturgis to help solve the murder of a celebrity author.For three months the police found no clues to the murder of Hope Devane, psy...

  • The Web

    • / Police/Detective/Law Enforcement
    • Buy Buy

    Three months in paradise, all expenses paid. It's an invitation Dr. Alex Delaware cannot refuse. Revered scientist Dr. Woodrow Wilson Moreland has invited Alex to a remote Pacific island to help him organize his papers for publication. Yet the ple...




  • The Things We Do for Love

    in Murder for Love

    Sixteen stories about love gone wrong consider the link between romance and death and include contributions by such popular authors as Mary Higgins Clark, Jonathan Kellerman, Elmore Leonard, Ed McBain, and Joyce Carol Oates. Reprint....

  • Self-Defense

    • / Police/Detective/Law Enforcement
    • Buy Buy

    Dr Alex Delaware doesn't see many private patients any more, but for a young woman called Lucy Lowell he's prepared to make an exception. Referred to him by the police detective Milo Sturgis, Lucy had been a juror at the harrowing trial of a serial k...

  • Bad Love

    • / Police/Detective/Law Enforcement
    • Buy Buy

    It came in a plain brown wrapper, no return address - a tape recording of a horrifying, soul-lacerating scream, followed by the sound of a childlike voice delivering the enigmatic and haunting message: 'Bad love. Bad love. Don't give me the bad l...

  • Devil's Waltz

    • / Police/Detective/Law Enforcement
    • Buy Buy

    Child psychologist Dr Alex Delaware returns after five years to Los Angeles' Western Pediatrics Hospital, called in by a former colleague to help with the case of twenty-one-month-old Cassie Jones. The little girl is persistently, terrifyingly ill, a...

  • Private Eyes

    • / Police/Detective/Law Enforcement
    • Buy Buy

    The voice belongs to a woman, but Dr. Alex  Delaware remembers a little girl. It is eleven  years since seven-years-old Melissa Dickinson dialed  a hospital help line for comfort--and found it in  therapy with Alex Delaware. Now the lovely yo...

  • Time Bomb

    • / Police/Detective/Law Enforcement
    • Buy Buy

    By the time psychologist Dr. Alex Delaware reached the school the damage was done: A sniper had opened fire on a crowded playground, but was gunned down before any children were hurt. While the TV news crews feasted on the scene and Alex began his...

  • Silent Partner

    • / Police/Detective/Law Enforcement
    • Buy Buy

    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 Al...

  • The Butcher's Theater

    They call the ancient hills of Jerusalem the  butcher's theater. Here, upon this bloodstained stage,  a faceless killer performs his violent specialty:  The first to die brutally is a fifteen-year-old  girl. She is drained of blood, then care...

  • Over the Edge

    • / Police/Detective/Law Enforcement
    • Buy Buy

    BRACE YOURSELF FOR SHOCK -- when Alex Delaware gets a phone call from a former patient, a young, troubled genius who suffered a devastating mental collapse... when he drives through the night to save his life and winds up in a morass of murder....

  • Blood Test

    • / Police/Detective/Law Enforcement
    • Buy Buy

    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 ...




  • When the Bough Breaks / Shrunken Heads

    • / Police/Detective/Law Enforcement
    • Buy Buy

    NIGHT TERRORS There is something spooky about this one, even for the dark side of L.A. A child molester's grisly suicide. A shockingly brutal double murder. A hidden network of perversion in high places. And a terrified seven-year-old girl who coul...

Complete Series List in Order

Alex Delaware

1) When the Bough Breaks / Shrunken Heads (Mar-1985)
2) Blood Test (Mar-1986)
3) Over the Edge (Apr-1987)
4) Silent Partner (Oct-1989)
5) Time Bomb (Sep-1990)
6) Private Eyes (Jan-1992)
7) Devil's Waltz (Jan-1993)
8) Bad Love (Feb-1994)
9) Self-Defense (Jan-1995)
10) The Web (Jan-1996)
11) The Clinic (Feb-1997)
12) Survival of the Fittest (Dec-1997)
13) Monster (Dec-1999)
14) Dr. Death (Dec-2000)
15) Flesh and Blood (Nov-2001)
16) The Murder Book (Oct-2002)
17) A Cold Heart (Apr-2003)
18) Therapy (Apr-2004)
19) Rage (May-2005)
21) Gone (Apr-2006)
21) Obsession (Apr-2007)
22) Compulsion (Apr-2008)
23) Bones (Nov-2008)
24) Evidence (Oct-2009)
25) Deception (Apr-2010)
26) Mystery (Apr-2011)
27) Victims (Mar-2012)
28) Guilt (Feb-2013)
29) Killer (Feb-2014)
30) Motive (Feb-2015)
31) Breakdown (Feb-2016)
32) Heartbreak Hotel (Feb-2017)
33) Night Moves (Feb-2018)
34) The Wedding Guest (Feb-2019)
35) The Museum of Desire (Feb-2020)
36) Serpentine (Feb-2021)
37) City of the Dead (Feb-2022)
38) Unnatural History (Feb-2023)

Dr. Grace Blades

0.5) The Right Thing to Do: A Novella (Jul-2015)
1) The Murderer's Daughter (Aug-2015)

Petra Connor

1) Billy Straight (Dec-1998)
2) Twisted (Nov-2004)

Award-Winning Books by Jonathan Kellerman

When the Bough Breaks / Shrunken Heads
1986 Anthony Award -- First Novel
1986 Edgar Allan Poe Award -- First Novel
Author Information
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