Gone was published by Ballantine Books in 2006. Two graduate students in performance art stage their own kidnapping as a piece of conceptual theater — a deliberate provocation designed to blur the boundary between art and life. When one of them is subsequently found murdered, the investigation must determine whether the “performance” went wrong, whether it was always intended as cover for a real crime, or whether someone exploited the confusion for their own purposes.
The novel satirizes the contemporary art world’s fascination with transgression and the erasure of boundaries between performance and reality — while using that satire to construct a genuine murder mystery.
Collecting Gone
First edition (Ballantine Books, New York, 2006): Boards with dust jacket.
Market values:
- Fine in dust jacket: $15–$25
- Very good: $8–$15
Projected values (2026–2036): Modest appreciation.
The premise — graduate students who stage a fake disappearance as “performance art” that ends in real murder — allows Kellerman to satirize both academic pretension and the specific LA phenomenon of people who treat life as content. The blurring of performance and reality is a natural Kellerman theme: as a psychologist, he understands that the roles people play and the selves they are can become indistinguishable.
Frequently Asked Questions
Are any Alex Delaware novels adapted for film or television? When the Bough Breaks was adapted as a 1986 television film. Despite the series’ commercial success (over 40 novels, tens of millions of copies sold), no major film or television adaptation has been produced — unusual for such a long-running bestselling series. The psychological complexity may resist easy screen adaptation.