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• Privileged Information (1991)
• Private Practices (1993)
• Higher Authority (1994)
• Harm's Way (1996)
• Remote Control (1997)
• Critical Conditions (1998)
• Manner of Death (1999)
• Cold Case (2000)

To say that Stephen White gets better with every book would be incorrect: he’s been a very good author right from the beginning. But with each additional book White adds layers of significance to his cast of characters and their relationships. Devotees of White’s novels eagerly devour each new book to learn the latest developments in the lives of Dr. Alan Gregory, his wife Lauren Crowder, and friend Sam Purdy as much as for the mystery.

Stephen White comes by his knowledge of characters and their motivations from experience: he’s been a practicing clinical psychologist since earning his Ph.D. from the University of Colorado in 1979. (He received his undergraduate degree from Berkeley in 1972.)  In addition to his private practice, he has worked at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center and at Children’s Hospital in Denver, where he worked with pediatric cancer patients.

Privileged Information (1991)
Viking, 363 pages, ISBN 0-670-83765-2

In his first novel Stephen White introduces Dr. Alan Gregory, a clinical psychologist in Boulder, Colorado. When one of Gregory's female patients is found dead, an apparent suicide, the local paper begins printing anonymous allegations of sexual impropriety between the patient and the therapist. When more of his patients die, Alan Gregory begins to think that the deaths may be related and that the killer may also be one of his patients. With suspicions but no proof, Gregory is limited in what he's willing to tell the police because of the pact of confidentiality between doctor and patient—the sanctity of privileged information.

As Gregory wrestles with his professional conscience while trying to save his practice and, finally, his life, White introduces us to an array of characters: Gregory's wise-cracking urologist neighbor, Adrienne, and her husband Peter; his partner, Diane Estevez; the beautiful Lauren Crowder, a deputy district attorney investigating one of the deaths; and police investigator Sam Purdy. These well-drawn characters add interest and even a little humor to Alan Gregory's world.

Privileged Information is a nearly flawless thriller, one in which there are no screaming red herrings and no loose ends. White maintains suspense while providing an ending that is plausible and satisfying.

Stephen White must have read the books exhorting writers to hook the reader's attention with their opening sentences. This book opens with an armed man and a woman hostage arriving at the back door to Dr. Alan Gregory's office. Before Gregory registers exactly what's happening, the man has taken his hostage into the adjoining office, where Gregory's partner, Diane Estevez, is seeing a patient. The armed man now has three female hostages. The police arrive but are unable to prevent the man from killing the patient, who is his estranged wife, and seriously wounding the original hostage, his wife's divorce lawyer.

The dead woman, Claire Draper, was scheduled to appear as a witness before a grand jury investigating a local political scandal. Shortly after the opening mayhem Gregory drives his now girlfriend, deputy district attorney Lauren Crowder, to the home of another grand jury witness. As Gregory admires Lauren walking toward the house, the place explodes, killing the witness inside. Is someone killing off grand jury witnesses, or are the two deaths merely a coincidence?

At the same time Gregory is treating Randy Navens, age 17, who survived the crash of a commercial jetliner that killed his mother, father, and sister. Randy was left with a trust fund of about $4 million; his legal guardians are now his aunt and uncle, who have recently opened a trendy, expensive restaurant on the outskirts of Boulder and who don't seem to have time to worry much about Randy.

Soon these seemingly unrelated threads begin to intertwine. The link between the various occurrences seems to lie in the records of a dead psychologist. Diane Estevez has legal custody of those records. As in White's previous novel, Privileged Information, Estevez and Gregory agonize over whether they have the right to examine the records and how much information from the records they can give to the police.

Once again Stephen White has produced a riveting thriller that successfully ties together several different strands, although I do hope he will discover some new material besides the confidentiality of patient records. In addition to Diane, the rest of the supporting cast appear here: Lauren, who is becoming an important part of Alan Gregory's life; Sam Purdy, who is beginning to respect Gregory's analytical ability and psychological insight; and, for comic relief, the ever wise-cracking Adrienne.
 

After Private Practices I hoped that Stephen White would find a new topic other than patient confidentiality. He has: in Higher Authority he takes on the Mormon Church.

When Utah Senator Orrin Hatch dies suddenly (both an author's note and a publisher's note emphasize that the book is a work of fiction), he is succeeded by Lester Horner. Horner, a high official in the Mormon Church, soon goes on to become the first Mormon appointed to the United States Supreme Court. On his upward political journey he takes along his favorite law clerk, the ambitious Blythe Oaks, also a Mormon. When Oaks is accused of sexual harassment by a female former employee, both her own and Horner's political futures are threatened.

Blythe Oaks's accuser is aspiring stand-up comic Teresa Crowder, the younger sister of deputy district attorney Lauren Crowder. Lauren, now engaged to Dr. Alan Gregory, is eager to help out her kid sister, with the assistance of Gregory and his buddy, Boulder detective Sam Purdy.

Any writer of series books knows the biggest potential problem is that readers will get bored with the same characters repeatedly presented in the same way. In this book the Gregory gang doesn't arrive on the scene until well into the story. In fact, by the time Lauren, Alan, and Sam show up, they seem to be almost an afterthought. By then the real story is the inner workings of the Mormon hierarchy. Whether intentionally or not, in Higher Authority White has managed to continue his series characters without wearing them out.

In the fourth installment of his Alan Gregory series, White brings to the fore a couple of the minor characters from the previous novels—Gregory's neighbors, urologist Adrienne and her husband, Peter Arvin.

The reclusive Peter, a crafter of custom wood cabinets and furniture, has always been a very self-contained man who wouldn't allow anyone to get close to him. Even the marriage of Peter and Adrienne seemed more an arrangement of convenience than a soul-sharing, passionate relationship. But now Peter and Adrienne have a son, Jonas, about a year old. Everyone who knows Peter agrees that the birth of Jonas changed him; for the first time he let someone need him and let himself get close to another human being.

When Peter is murdered at a theater in Boulder, the police think his death is a copycat murder fashioned after a killing in Denver a few months earlier. But Adrienne suspects there may be more behind Peter's death. She asks Alan to find out why Peter, whom she feels she never really knew, was killed. Alan's investigation turns into a psychological post-mortem examination of a man who had kept his past carefully guarded.

The main action of Remote Control opens with Lauren Crowder out in a blinding snowstorm with a handgun. When police find a man wounded in the street after Lauren has shot her gun, she turns herself over to the authorities and is taken to jail. Both jail personnel and the prosecutor's office are concerned over how to treat a deputy district attorney, but Lauren has her own problems: she's suffering an exacerbation of her multiple sclerosis. To prevent blindness she needs immediate medical treatment—something she's not going to get in jail. All she can do is call her husband, psychologist Dr. Alan Gregory, for help.

Alan is stunned when Lauren calls him. He didn't know where she had gone or why, and he didn't even know that she owned a gun. When Lauren refuses to tell either Alan or the police why she was out in a snowstorm with a gun, Alan realizes that he'll have to figure out on his own what's going on.

The novel's backstory unfolds gradually as Alan works his way through things. Emma Spire had become the nation's darling after she watched her father, Surgeon General of the United States, gunned down at an airport baggage carousel because of his position favoring abortion rights. Now, a few years later, Emma has returned to live in her grandmother's house and attend law school in Colorado. When Emma begins an internship in the Boulder district attorney's office, Lauren takes Emma under her wing. At about the same time Emma starts dating an entrepreneurial computer whiz involved in the development of equipment to digitize human experience.

The scene of the shooting and Lauren's arrest is a street near Emma's house, but Lauren won't tell anyone, including Alan, why she was there. As Alan tries to learn the facts so he can help Lauren, he becomes more and more exasperated with her refusal to tell him what's going on. She continues to insist that she can't violate Emma's privacy. The more Alan discovers, the more complex and bizarre the story becomes.

The underlying plot line is far-fetched, but it is not the main feature of this novel. More important, within the context of White's Alan Gregory series, are the questions this installment raises about Alan and Lauren's relationship. He can't believe that she had never told him that she owns, and frequently carries, a gun. And at the end Alan and Lauren get into some thorny, and ultimately unresolved, questions about trust: How much can he, a psychologist who must honor patient confidentiality, tell her, an assistant district attorney? When he tells her something about a friend of theirs, will she be listening as his wife or as a potential prosecutor? These are questions the couple will have to work out, and this is the note on which the book ends.

I can't quite put my finger on what it is about this book that bothers me, but this latest installment is not up to Stephen White's usual standard. The fact that much of the story is told in flashback in this case removes the characters from the action. And often it seems that what is not happening is more important than what is happening. Even under the circumstances, it's hard to believe that Lauren's friend wouldn't be better off if Lauren would just tell the police what's going on. Again, I hope that Stephen White will find some subject matter other than the patient/client confidentiality issue. He has worried that topic enough, and, at least in this case, it's getting in the way of his fiction.

In his previous novel, Remote Control, Stephen White left his characters, Dr. Alan Gregory and wife Lauren Crowder, with unresolved issues that involve both their personal and professional lives. In Critical Conditions White avoids dealing with those issues by removing Lauren to her mother's sickbed for the duration of the story. But Lauren's absence provides Alan the opportunity to cultivate his growing friendship with Boulder homicide detective Sam Purdy, a relationship that adds further depth to this fine suspense series.

In Critical Conditions psychologist Alan Gregory is called in as a consult for a 15-year-old girl brought into the hospital after a suicide attempt. When the girl, Merritt, recovers from her drug overdose, she refuses to speak to anyone. Meanwhile, evidence mounts implicating Merritt in a recent murder in Boulder. As a psychologist Alan often is at odds with the police, who want him to reveal confidential information. But in this novel, as the plot continues to thicken, Alan and Sam both must find ways to work together while still maintaining their own profession's ethics.

I didn't care much for Remote Control. But in Critical Conditions Stephen White once again returns to the high level of intelligent suspense writing that hooked me on this series in the first place.

One by one, members of the division in a Denver hospital where Dr. Alan Gregory did his psychology internship are turning up dead. Individually, the deaths look unremarkable. But in the aggregate, the deaths suggest that an intelligent serial killer is carrying out a cunning plan. And the next victim could be Alan Gregory.

Or the next victim might be the only other remaining person from that division, Sawyer Sackett, M.D. During training Alan and Sawyer had carried on an intense love affair that ended abruptly when she disappeared with no explanation. Now Alan must find Sawyer Sackett, and together they must try to find a killer before that killer finds them. In this pursuit they’re on their own because the sanctity of patient confidentiality prevents them from giving police the names of patients from that time who might now be carrying out their revenge.

In the past I’ve complained about Stephen White’s overuse of the issue of patient confidentiality. However, in Manner of Death this issue is an integral part of the story. And Alan’s forced reunion with his former lover causes him to think about his relationship with his wife, assistant district attorney Lauren Crowder; this soul-searching adds depth and complexity to both Alan’s character and the series as a whole.

I’m still waiting for Alan and Lauren to deal specifically with the issues of personal trust vs. professional responsibility that came up between them at the end of Remote Control. Perhaps they never will. But as long as Stephen White keeps writing this series, I’ll keep on reading.

In an earlier case Dr. Alan Gregory and his wife, Lauren Crowder, worked with retired FBI agent A.J. Simes. Cold Case begins with a phone call to Alan and Lauren from A.J. asking them to come to Washington, D.C., to consult with a law-enforcement organization on a case.

The secretive organization is Locard, a group of people with various law-enforcement skills who volunteer their services to help solve old cases that have gone cold: cold cases.  The case Locard has chosen to work on involves the deaths of two teenaged girls, Tami Franklin and Miko Hamamoto, more than 10 years earlier in Steamboat Springs, in the Elk River Valley, Colorado. Locard hopes that Lauren, as a Colorado attorney,  will help with local legal matters; Alan, as a psychologist, is to prepare a psychological profile of the two girls that may help Locard to determine how they were murdered and by whom.

In addition to the murders of Tami and Miko, the Elk River Valley was also the scene of another well-publicized murder: that of Gloria Welle, wife of psychotherapist Dr. Raymond Welle. The blustery Welle, who became famous as America’s psychotherapist with a talk show, has parlayed his fame into a seat in the U.S. Congress and has even greater political ambitions.

As Alan begins his explorations into the lives of the two dead girls, he’s surprised to find that he keeps bumping up against Raymond Welle. The deeper Alan digs, the more complex the case becomes—and the more dangerous.

Once again White keeps his series fresh with the introduction of minor characters (in this case, Kimber Lister, the reclusive leader of Locard) and local color (the climax of the novel occurs in an unusual but entirely appropriate location).
 

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