Status
Call number
Series
Genres
Collections
Publication
Description
In the silent pre-dawn city hours -- alone with his thoughts about Rina Lazarus, the woman he loves, three thousand miles away in New York -- LAPD detective Peter Decker finds a small child, abandoned and covered in blood that is not hers. It is a sobering discovery, and a perplexing one, for nobody in the development where she was found steps forward to claim the little girl. Obsessed more deeply by this case than he imagined possible, Decker is determined to follow the scant clues to an answer. But his trail is leading him to a killing ground where four bodies lie still and lifeless. And by the time Rina returns, Peter Decker is already held fast in a sticky mass of hatred, passion, and murder -- in a world where intense sweetness is accompanied by a deadly sting.… (more)
User reviews
This is the third book of a series with this detective (and his girlfriend). I haven't read the first two, but didn't feel at a loss at any time for not having read the first two.
Rina is still in New York but she does come back in the middle of the investigation and things start moving in the right direction.
PS: When Rina exited the plane she said she had not checked any luggage. Then later she said her gun had been in the packed luggage. Unless if I am mistaken and packed does not really mean checked, then the author seems to have forgotten the lack of luggage on arrival. Not that it really matters...
That last mystery leads to a revelation about something Peter did back then that he's never truly dealt with. It's a powerful scene, as is the story Peter hears about his rabbi's escape from the Nazis during World War II.
One of the toddler cases leads to a gruesome discovery. The other one leads to a mixed outcome. I rather liked the way Ms. Kellerman worked the Biblical phrase about the land of milk and honey into the story.
Rina is visiting from New York. There's progress on the Decker-Lazarus front!
Persons using or being used by another/others is a major theme. Both Christian and Jewish characters are guilty. (I was rather surprised by when the author wrote that Decker wouldn't have known that the Biblical Rachel was meant a year ago. He was reared Baptist, so I would have expected him to know. I'm Catholic and I got the reference.)
Warning: there's considerable use of the racist 'N' word in this book. It's used only by bigots, disgusts the main characters, and leads to a situation worth a chortle. There's another chortle-worthy development regarding Rina's family's attitude toward Pete. (I chortled again just thinking about it.)
The book jumped around a lot and just didn’t leave much of an impression on me. Other than the small child involved, I didn’t feel much for any of the perpetrators/victims in either plot line. Rina plays a very small part in the story, and seems to only be there as a recipient of some information about Decker’s past. It wasn’t weak enough for me to give up on the series, but I won’t be rushing out to pick up the next one either.
Also, I was expecting that a series of mysteries known as the Peter Decker/Rina Lazarus mysteries would involve both characters in solving the mysteries. Instead, it seems like Decker does all the solving, and Rina Lazarus serves as muse/love interest/source of conflict. Yes, there are other women involved in crime-solving, but Decker is really the POV character and by halfway through this book, I had realized that I didn't like him or his point of view. YMMV.