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At 8:15 in the morning, a small commuter plane carrying forty-seven passengers crashes into an apartment building in Granada Hills, California. Shock waves ripple through Los Angeles, as L.A.P.D. Lieutenant Peter Decker works overtime to calm rampant fears of a 9/11-type terror attack. But a grisly mystery lives inside the plane's charred and twisted wreckage: the unidentified bodies of four extra travelers. And there is no sign of an airline employee who was supposedly on the catastrophic flight. Decker and his wife, Rina, have personal reasons for being profoundly shaken by the tragedy, since the "accident" occurred frighteningly close to their daughter Hannah's school. Luckily, their child and her schoolmates escaped unscathed. But the fate of the unaccounted-for flight attendant--twenty-eight-year-old Roseanne Dresden--remains a question mark more than a month after the horrific event, when the young woman's irate stepfather calls, insisting that she was never onboard the doomed plane. Instead, he claims, she was most likely murdered by her abusive, unfaithful husband. But why, then, was Roseanne's name included on the passenger list? Under intense pressure from the department to come up with answers, Decker launches an investigation that carries him down a path of tragic history, dangerous secrets, and deadly lies--and leads him to the corpse of a three-decades-missing murder victim. And as the jagged pieces slowly fall into place, a frightening picture begins to form: a mind-searing portrait of unimaginable evil that will challenge Decker's and Rina's own beliefs about guilt and innocence and justice.… (more)
User reviews
The story
purported to have been on the plane, becomes more complex with the appearance of another
body in the rubble. Police procedure and how their families must cope became more real to me
in this book than similar books I have read in the past. Just when I thought I had it all figured out
(as did the team of investigators), it spun around in a completely different direction. I found the
book at once believable yet surprising, and intricately woven. I am certainly going to search out
more of the many earlier books featuring this duo.
the
by Faye Kellerman
Genre: Mystery
Book #16 in the Peter Decker and Rita Lazarus series
A plane crashes into an apartment building and flight attendant Roseanne Dresden perishes in the crash - or does she?
Plot
A plane crashes. Everyone believes that Roseanne Dresden, a flight attendant, died
Setting
Los Angeles, Burbank, San Jose
modern day
Characters
Peter Decker - detective
Roseanne Dresden - flight attendant, missing, though dead in crash
Isabella (Beth) Hernandez - dead woman discovered in apartment building leveled by crash, cold case
Marge - detective
Oliver - detective
Rina - Peter's wife
Pacing
steady, nice way of adding information and keeping the reader guessing
Narration
third person
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Language - strong
Sex - talk of wanting to have sex, prostitutes, cheating, swinging, nothing too explicit
Violence - descriptions of crimes
Homosexuality? none
On the personal level, the interaction between Peter and Rina is perfunctory, and while I have always respected Rina's faith and commitment to religious observance, in this book she comes across as just plain preachy. Finally, as I often notice in series fiction such as this, The Burnt House shows almost no evidence of editing. I think certain authors become "untouchable" at about the same time they may be getting too comfortable with their recurring characters, which leads to a muddled over-long novel like this one.
I've read Faye Kellerman's Peter Decker series for years. It is without a doubt one of my favorites. This will not disappoint fans of the series or any newbie's starting to read it.
A small commuter plane crashes into an apartment building. Everyone aboard is killed. As authorities comb the wreckage to recover bodies, the body of a
As Decker investigates both of these cases, his team is sent back and forth from Los Angeles to San Jose to New Mexico as they slowly gather enough details to solve both mysteries.
The story was good but not so engaging that I couldn't put the book down. Faye Kellerman is an excellent writer, and her writing is what elevated this novel despite the lack of character depth. It's possible that the character depth was lacking because it had already been dealt with in previous Decker/Lazarus novels, but it seemed noticeably shallow in this book.
Regardless, I did enjoy this book, just not as much as I usually enjoy Kellerman's books.