Clay Edison

About the Clay Edison series

Jonathan Kellerman's only ongoing series co-written with his son, novelist Jesse Kellerman, trades Alex Delaware's Los Angeles psychology practice for the more procedural world of Clay Edison, a deputy coroner's investigator for Alameda County in the East Bay. Clay isn't a detective and carries no gun; his job is to determine cause and manner of death and identify the dead, which in practice means he's usually first on scene at a body no one has explained yet -- and the person best positioned to notice when an ordinary-looking death isn't what it looks like. Crime Scene (2017) sets up his methodical, observational style and his combustible partnership with Deputy Sheriff Sean Ang; a decades-old skeleton found during a demolition pulls Clay into a case the official record already considers closed.

Across the series, the father-son writing partnership shows in a slightly different rhythm than Alex Delaware: Clay is younger, more blue-collar and less psychologically self-analytical than Alex, with a home life (a difficult father, a on-and-off relationship with girlfriend Amanda) that grounds the books in ordinary Bay Area life rather than the wealth and celebrity that mark much of the Delaware series. By The Lost Coast (2024) and Coyote Hills (2025), Clay has left the coroner's bureau for private investigation work, widening the series' scope while keeping its procedural, evidence-first approach to solving deaths other people have already written off.