The Ghost Orchid

A pool cleaner arrives at a private Bel Air estate and finds two bodies in the water. One is Gio Aggiunta, a playboy heir to an Italian shoe fortune. The other is Meagin March, a wealthy and strikingly beautiful neighbor who happens to be married to someone else. It looks like the obvious setup for a crime of passion, but nothing else about the scene fits. The house is undisturbed, nobody broke in, and the forensic trail is empty.

LAPD homicide lieutenant Milo Sturgis has worked in Los Angeles long enough to know how often people there remake themselves. He also knows that a new identity does not always shake off the people who remember the old one. Sensing something off about the case, he does what he usually does and calls his friend Alex Delaware, the psychologist whose insight has helped him through many investigations.

As the two men look into the victims' lives, they find that both carried troubled histories. Meagin in particular grows harder to pin down the closer they look. Was she hiding who she used to be, and did that earlier life finally come for her? Or did Gio's family ties put him in danger that reached across two continents?

The search takes Alex and Milo through some of the city's grimmest corners and into one of the most disturbing cases they have faced together. The Ghost Orchid is a Alex Delaware novel by Jonathan Kellerman, and it asks what happens when buried secrets are worth killing to protect.