A series of well-publicized gentle deaths are the work of self-appointed angel of mercy Dr. Eldon Mate, who attends to the terminally ill in cheap hotel rooms or in the back of his van. Now Mate himself is dead, carved up and found by two joggers and their dog on a high road above Los Angeles.
One of Argent's patients at Starkweather is Ardis "Monster" Peake, imprisoned for the unbelievably brutal murders of his mother and the family she worked for, including a small child and a baby. There's at least one eerie similarity between the mutilation of their bodies and Argent's: in all the bodies, the eyes were taken or destroyed.
Legendary L.A. psychologist-turned-novelist Kellerman raids real life when inventing the adventures of his psychologist sleuth, Dr. Alex Delaware, and some of the scariest parts of Survival of the Fittest are historical. Eugenicists lurk behind a murder spree Alex must solve, and he notes that the eugenics movement involved one elite U.S. college professor who advocated castration of ethnically lesser men, a forced sterilization ordered by Supreme Court Justice Holmes that Hitler used as a precedent to sterilize millions, and the pre-Holocaust coinage of the phrase "final solution."
Former child psychologist Jonathan Kellerman brings us the 11th installment in the reliable series featuring child psychologist Alex Delaware. Here Delaware teams up again with his old friend Detective Milo Sturgis of the LAPD to investigate the brutal murder of Dr. Hope Devane. Her bestselling book about how men victimize women made her famous; did it also lead to her death? As Sturgis and Delaware begin probing into the details of her life, they find more and more secrets and slowly close in on a killer filled with hate. As usual, Kellerman combines convincing psychological portraits with good dialogue and a plot that coils to a tense finish.
Returning in top form, Kellerman's semi-retired psychotherapist, Dr. Alex Delaware, who was introduced in When the Bough Breaks (1985), traces a young woman's dreams back to crimes committed 20 years earlier. A few months after serving on an L.A. jury that finds a landscape laborer guilty of a series of grotesque mutilations and killings,
