Monster

In Johathan Kellerman's riveting and ingenious new novel, Monster, Dr Alex Delaware faces one of the most grisly and baffling mysteries of his career: how can a non-functional psychotic, locked up in a supposedly secure institution for homicidal madmen, predict brutal murders in the outside world? Delaware and his friend and partner, Detective Milo Sturgis, must penetrate this enigma in order to stop the horrific killings.

A minor actor is found dead in the boot of a car, his body sawn in half. Months later a psychologist at a hospital for the criminally insane is discovered murdered and mutilated in an eerily similar way. When reports of an inmate's incoherent ramblings begin to make frightening sense as the predictions of yet more deaths, Delaware and Sturgis are drawn into a web of family secrets, vengeance and manipulation - both inside the asylum and on the streets of Los Angeles, where death, drugs and sex are marketed as commodities. The climactic discovery they make as they race to prevent more killings gives fresh and terrifying meaning to the concept of monstrosity.