Victims

Vita Berlin was sharp-tongued and friendless, but someone hated her enough to kill her and then pose her body with deliberate, disturbing care. When LAPD detective Milo Sturgis sees the scene, he calls in the person he trusts most with twisted minds: psychologist Alex Delaware.

The case grows darker when more victims turn up, each killed in the same grisly manner and none of them obviously connected to the others. The killer leaves just one clue at every scene, a blank page with a single question mark. It could be a cruel taunt, or it could be a desperate plea from someone deeply damaged.

With the city edging toward panic, Alex has to work his way through the closed-off world of mental health care. His search takes him from a polished Beverly Hills therapist's office to an abandoned psychiatric hospital where he once trained. As the pieces slowly come together, they reveal a disturbed mind and a cruelty that is hard to look at.

Victims is a novel in Jonathan Kellerman's long-running Alex Delaware series, built on the partnership between a detective and a clinical psychologist.