Silent Partner (Alex Delaware Series #4) » (Abridged)

Child psychologist-turned-novelist Jonathan Kellerman uses his knowledge of the psyche's weaknesses to create chilling crime novels, many starring detective (and former child psychologist, natch) Alex Delaware and cop friend Milo Sturgis.

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.

Publishers Weekly

Stricken with guilt over the suicide of a former lover, child psychologist Alex Delaware is driven to understand the circumstances that led to her death. ``Kellerman bares a dark, brooding side of his appealing series' detective in this complex tale of guilt, greed and expiation,'' commented PW. (Sept.)