Faye Kellerman

Read a Faye Kellerman a few years ago, and didnt like it, much preferring her husband's style, so have avoided reading this one for a while.[return][return]However, did enjoy it more than I thought I would![return][return]Synopsis: "While on a camping trip, Detective Peter Decker and his two young charges come across the charred remains of two teenage girls. Embroiled in a disturbing case, Decker's only unifying thread in a network of violence and corruption is the deaths of the two apparently very different young girls."[return][return]It's early in the series, so Decker is single, and is also struggling with his imminent conversion/acceptance into Judaism… (more)

Retired from the LAPD to be closer to his kids on the East Coast, Detective Peter Decker is now attached to the Greenbury Police Department but finds just as many felonies in the Five Colleges region of upstate New York. On the whole, the theft of a pair of Tiffany windows from the Bergman family crypt at the local cemetery looks like a professional job. Whoever stole the panels obviously took them one at a time, replacing them with fakes in planning to come back for the winter and spring ones later on. The fakes themselves, however, are amateurish... even Decker, who is in no way an art expert, spots one of them as a li counterfeit before Bergman descendant Ken Sobel and his son-in-law, gallery owner Max Stewart, confirm his suspicions. It’s not at all obvious who pulled off the switch, but it’s practically certain that the forger was Littleton College art student Angeline Moreau. Now it’s going to take the services of a talented "ghost whisperer" to question Angeline, who has been brutally murdered. Decker and his rookie partner, the insufferable Harvard grad Tyler McAdams, turn their attention to identifying her accomplice as Tufts postgraduate, John Latham, but then... he’s murdered also. Throughout the complications that follow.... which includes an intense rivalry among competing art galleries...the unsolved 30-year-old theft of some Russian mosaics...attempts on the two detectives' lives...enemy agents and government officials doing everything in their power to keep everything quiet...the presence of the conceited and clueless McAdams which gives Decker an excuse for explaining everything from simple police procedure to the kiddush blessing of the wine. Yeah...that's way, way, way too much info and this longtime fan of the series, grew aggravated and just wanted the whole thing to end. I love the Decker series...but this one?...not so much.… (more)