When the Bough Breaks (Alex Delaware)

When the Bough Breaks (Alex Delaware) by Jonathan Kellerman. mass_market edition. ISBN: 9780345466600.

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. Its psychologist Dr. Alex Delawares job to try to unlock the terrible secret buried in Melodys memory. But as the sinister shadows in the girls 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.