Monster

How can a nonfunctional psychotic locked up in a supposedly secure institution for homicidal madmen predict brutal murders in the outside world? This is the enigma that Dr. Alex Deleware and Detective Milo Sturgis must penetrate in order to stop these horrific killings. First, a marginal actor is founf dead in a car trunk, sawn in half. Monts later, a psychologist at Starkweather Hospital for the Criminally Insane is discovered murdered and mutilated in a tantalizingly similar way. Dr. Claire Argent had been working careingly withArdis Peake, a subnormal mental patient locked up for decades after annihilating his mother and the ranching family that rescued him from homelessness. When reports of Peake's incoherent rambling begin to make frightening sense as predictions of yet more murders, Alex and Milo are drawn into a web of family secrets, vengeance, and manipulation-both inside Starkweather and on L.A. streets, where death, drugs, and sex are marketed as commodities. The climatic discovery they make as they race to save new victims gives fresh and terrifying meaning to the concept of true monstrosity. Copyright 1999 by Jonathan Kellerman. Published by Random House Publishing.