{"product_id":"gone-isbn-9780345540256","title":"Gone","description":"\u003cb\u003e#1 \u003ci\u003eNEW YORK TIMES \u003c\/i\u003eBESTSELLER • The iconic thriller series that inspired the upcoming streaming show on Prime Video\u003ci\u003e, \u003c\/i\u003ein development now!\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMissing acting students Dylan and Michaela are found in the remote mountains of Malibu, battered and terrified after a harrowing ordeal at the hands of a sadistic abductor. But forensic evidence soon exposes the incident as a hoax, and the kids are charged as criminals themselves. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e“Kellerman shows why he is called the ‘master of the psychological thriller.’”—\u003ci\u003eOrlando Sentinel\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAfter examining Michaela, psychologist Alex Delaware is certain that there’s more to this sordid psychodrama, and his instincts prove dead-on when she is savagely murdered. Casting their dragnet into the murkiest corners of L.A., Delaware and homicide cop Milo Sturgis unearth more questions than answers—and a host of eerily identical killings. What bizarre and brutal epidemic is infecting the city with terror, madness, and sudden, twisted death?“The denouement accelerates to breathtaking, heart-pounding speed.”—\u003ci\u003ePittsburgh Post-Gazette\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “Sharply written and well-paced.”—\u003ci\u003eEntertainment Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eJonathan Kellerman\u003c\/b\u003e is the #1 \u003ci\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/i\u003e bestselling author of more than three dozen bestselling crime novels, including the Alex Delaware series, \u003ci\u003eThe Butcher’s Theater, Billy Straight, The Conspiracy Club,\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003eTwisted, \u003c\/i\u003eand\u003ci\u003e True Detectives\u003c\/i\u003e. With his wife, bestselling novelist Faye Kellerman, he co-authored \u003ci\u003eDouble Homicide \u003c\/i\u003eand\u003ci\u003e Capital Crimes\u003c\/i\u003e. With his son, bestselling novelist Jesse Kellerman, he co-authored the first book of a new series, \u003ci\u003eThe Golem of Hollywood\u003c\/i\u003e. He is also the author of two children’s books and numerous nonfiction works, including \u003ci\u003eSavage Spawn: Reflections on Violent Children \u003c\/i\u003eand\u003ci\u003e With Strings Attached: The Art and Beauty of Vintage Guitars\u003c\/i\u003e. He has won the Goldwyn, Edgar, and Anthony awards and has been nominated for a Shamus Award. Jonathan and Faye Kellerman live in California and New Mexico.CHAPTER 1\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e      She nearly killed an innocent man.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e      Creighton “Charley” Bondurant drove carefully because his life depended on  it. Latigo Canyon was mile after mile of neck-wrenching, hairpin twists.  Charley had no use for government meddlers but the   15 mph signs posted along the road were smart.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    He lived ten miles up from Kanan Dume Road, on a four-acre remnant of the  ranch his grandfather had owned during Coolidge’s time. All those Arabians  and Tennessee walkers and the mules Grandpa kept around because he liked  the creatures’ spirit. Charley had grown up with families like his.  No-nonsense ranchers, a few rich folk who were still okay when they came  up to ride on weekends. Now all you had were rich pretenders.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Diabetic and rheumatoid and depressed, Charley lived in a two-room cabin  with a view of oak-covered crests and the ocean beyond. Sixty-eight, never  married. Poor excuse for a man, he’d scold himself on nights when the  medicines mixed with the beer and his mood sank low.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    On happier days, he pretended to be an old cowboy.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    This morning, he was somewhere between those extremes. His bunions hurt  like hell. Two horses had died last winter and he was down to three skinny  white mares and a half-blind sheepdog. Feed and hay bills ate up most of  his Social Security. But the nights had been warm for October, and he  hadn’t dreamed bad and his bones felt okay.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    It was hay that got him up at seven that morning, rolling out of bed,  gulping coffee, chewing on a stale sweet roll, to hell with his blood  sugar. A little time-out to get the internal plumbing going and by eight  he was dressed and starting up the pickup.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Coasting in neutral down the dirt road that fed to Latigo, he looked both  ways a couple of times, cleared the crust from his eyes, shifted into  first, and rolled down. The Topanga Feed Bin was a twenty-minute ride  south and he figured to stop along the way at the Malibu Stop \u0026amp; Shop for a  few six-packs, a tin of Skoal, and some Pringles.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Nice morning, a big old blue sky with just a few clouds from the east,  sweet air blowing up from the Pacific. Switching on his eight-track, he  listened to Ray Price and drove slow enough to stop for deer. Not too many  of the pests before dark but you never knew what to expect up in the  mountains.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The naked girl jumped out at him a lot faster than any deer.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Eyes full of terror, mouth stretched so wide Charley swore he could see  her tonsils.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    She ran across the road, straight in the path of his truck, hair blowing  wild, waving her arms.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Stomping the brake pedal hard, Charley felt the pickup lurch, wobble, and  sway. Then the sharp skid to the left, straight at the battered guardrail  that separated him from a thousand foot of nothing.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Hurtling toward blue sky.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    He kept hitting the brake. Kept flying. Said his prayers and opened the  door and prepared to bail.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    His damn shirt stuck on the door handle. Eternity looked real close. What  a stupid way to go!\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Hands ripping at his shirt fabric, mouth working in a combination of  curses and benedictions, Charley’s gnarled body tightened, his legs turned  to iron bars, and his sore foot pressed that brake pedal down to the damn  floorboard.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The truck kept going, fishtailed, slid, spattered gravel.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Shuddered. Rolled. Bumped the guard.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Charley could hear the rail groan.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The truck stopped.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Charley freed his shirt and got out. His chest was tight and he couldn’t  suck any breath into his lungs. Wouldn’t that be the shits: spared a free  fall to oblivion only to drop dead of a damned heart attack.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    He gasped and swallowed air, felt his field of vision grow black and  braced himself against the truck. The chassis creaked and Charley jumped  back, felt himself going down again.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    A scream pierced the morning. Charley opened his eyes and straightened and  saw the girl. Red marks around her wrists and ankles. Bruises around her  neck.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Beautiful young body, those healthy knockers bobbing as she came running  toward him—sinful to think like that, she was scared, but with knockers  like that what else was there to notice?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    She kept coming, arms wide, like she wanted Charley to hold her.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    But screaming, those wild eyes, he wasn’t sure what to do.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    First time in a long time he’d been this close to bare female flesh.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    He forgot about the knockers, nothing sexy about this. She was a kid,  young enough to be his daughter. Granddaughter.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Those marks on her wrists and ankles, around her neck.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    She screamed again.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Ohgodohgoohgod.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    She was right up to him, now, yellow hair whipping his face. He could  smell the fear on her. See the goose bumps on her pretty tan shoulders.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Help me!”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Poor kid was shivering.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Charley held her.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e      CHAPTER\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    2\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e      L.A.’s where you end up when you have nowhere else to go.    A long time ago I’d driven west from Missouri, a   sixteen-year-old high school graduate armed with a head full of  desperation and a partial academic scholarship to the U.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Only son of a moody, hard drinker and a chronic depressive. Nothing to  keep me in the flatlands.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Living like a pauper on work-study and occasional guitar gigs in wedding  bands, I managed to get educated. Made some money as a psychologist, and a  lot more from lucky investments. Got The House In The Hills.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Relationships were another story, but that would’ve been true no matter  where I lived.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Back when I treated children, I routinely took histories from parents and  learned what family life could be like in L.A. People packing up and  moving every year or two, the surrender to impulse, the death of domestic  ritual.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Many of the patients I saw lived in sun-baked tracts with no other kids  nearby and spent hours each day being bused to and from beige corrals that  claimed to be schools. Long, electronic nights were bleached by cathode  and thump-thumped by the current angry music. Bedroom windows looked out  to hazy miles of neighborhoods that couldn’t really be called that.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Lots of imaginary friends in L.A. That, I supposed, was inevitable. It’s a  company town and the product is fantasy.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The city kills grass with red carpets, worships fame for its own sake,  demolishes landmarks with glee because the high-stakes game is  reinvention. Show up at your favorite restaurant and you’re likely to find  a sign trumpeting failure and the windows covered with brown paper. Phone  a friend and get a disconnected number.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    No Forwarding. It could be the municipal motto.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    You can be gone in L.A. for a long time before anyone considers it a  problem.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    When Michaela Brand and Dylan Meserve went missing, no one seemed to  notice.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Michaela’s mother was a former truck-stop cashier living with an oxygen  tank in Phoenix. Her father was unknown, probably one of the teamsters  Maureen Brand had entertained over the years. Michaela had left Arizona to  get away from the smothering heat, gray shrubs, air that never moved, no  one caring about The Dream.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    She rarely called her mother. The hiss of Maureen’s tank, Maureen’s  sagging body, ragged cough, and emphysemic eyes drove her nuts. No room  for any of that in Michaela’s L.A. head.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Dylan Meserve’s mother was long dead from an undiagnosed degenerative  neuromuscular disease. His father was a Brooklyn-based alto sax player  who’d never wanted a rug rat in the first place and had died of an  overdose five years ago.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Michaela and Dylan were gorgeous and young and thin and had come to L.A.  for the obvious reason.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    By day, he sold shoes at a Foot Locker in Brentwood. She was a lunch  waitress at a pseudo-trattoria on the east end of Beverly Hills.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    They’d met at the PlayHouse, taking an Inner Drama seminar from Nora Dowd.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The last time anyone had seen them was on a Monday night, just after ten  p.m., leaving the acting workshop together. They’d worked their butts off  on a scene from Simpatico. Neither really got what Sam Shepard was aiming  for but the play had plenty of juicy parts, all that screaming. Nora Dowd  had urged them to inject themselves in the scene, smell the horseshit,  open themselves up to the pain and the hopelessness.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Both of them felt they’d delivered. Dylan’s Vinnie had been perfectly wild  and crazy and dangerous, and Michaela’s Rosie was a classy woman of  mystery.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Nora Dowd had seemed okay with the performance, especially Dylan’s  contribution.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    That frosted Michaela a bit but she wasn’t surprised.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Watching Nora go off on one of those speeches about right brain–  left brain. Talking more to herself than to anyone else.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The PlayHouse’s front room was set up like a theater, with a stage and  folding chairs. The only time it got used was for seminars.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Lots of seminars, no shortage of students. One of Nora’s alumni, a former  exotic dancer named April Lange, had scored a role on a sitcom on the WB.  An autographed picture of April used to hang in the entry before someone  took it down. Blond, shiny-eyed, vaguely predatory. Michaela used to  think: Why her?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Then again, maybe it was a good sign. If it could happen to April, it  could happen to anyone.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Dylan and Michaela lived in single-room studio apartments, his on  Overland, in Culver City, hers on Holt Avenue, south of Pico. Both their  cribs were tiny, dark, ground-floor units, pretty much dumps. This was  L.A., where rent could crush you and day jobs barely covered the basics  and it was hard, sometimes, not to get depressed.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    After they didn’t show up at work for two days running, their respective  employers fired them.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    And that was the extent of it.#1 New York Times bestselling author; Author of Guilt","brand":"Ballantine Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46302957043941,"sku":"NP9780345540256","price":10.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780345540256.jpg?v=1767728304","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/gone-isbn-9780345540256","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}