When the Bough Breaks

Description

***In the first Alex Delaware novel, Dr. Morton Handler practiced a strange brand of psychiatry. Among his specialties were fraud, extortion, and sexual manipulation.*** Handler paid for his sins when he was brutally murdered in his luxurious Pacific Palisades apartment. The police have no leads, but they do have ***one possible witness: seven-year-old Melody Quinn.*** It's psychologist Dr. Alex Delaware's job to try to unlock the terrible secret buried in Melody's memory. But as the sinister shadows in the girl's mind begin to take shape, Alex discovers that the mystery touches a shocking incident in his own past. This connection is only the beginning, ***a single link in a forty-year-old conspiracy.*** ***And behind it lies an unspeakable evil that Alex Delaware must expose before it claims another innocent victim: Melody Quinn.*** **In 1985, Jonathan's first novel, WHEN THE BOUGH BREAKS, was published to enormous critical and commercial success and became a New York Times bestseller.** BOUGH was also produced as a t.v. movie and won the Edgar Allan Poe and Anthony Boucher Awards for Best First Novel. Since then, Jonathan has published a best-selling crime novel every year, and occasionally, two a year. In addition, **he has written and illustrated two books for children and a nonfiction volume on childhood violence, SAVAGE SPAWN (1999.)** ***Though no longer active as a psychotherapist, he is a Clinical Professor of Pediatrics and Psychology at University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine.***

Description

Alex Delaware, a child psychologist, is drawn to a case that endangers first his career and then his life. He is asked to help get information from the little girl who was the only witness to a gruesome double murder. He examines a disturbed young girl and uncovers evidence of a brutal double murder, a child molester's grisly suicide, and a horrible forty-year old secret that continues to have an effect today.--Aurora Canadian Library.

First Sentence

It was shaping up as a beautiful morning.

Subjects

Series Statement

• Alex Delaware (1)