Walking Shadows

I read Faye Kellerman's most recent Decker/Lazarus mystery, Walking Shadows, with bittersweet frustration. I didn't quite get the sense that the series is winding down, as in Diane Mott Davidson's The Whole Enchilada or in Marcia Muller's most recent books (with Sue Grafton's death - I still haven't brought myself to read Y Is for Yesterday because I know there will be no Z Is for Zero - Sara Paretsky is the only founding mother of the female PI genre still writing). In Kellerman's case, it's less a fear that she's going to end a series I've read since the mid-90s but a feeling that she should.

Kellerman coped with Peter Decker's retirement from the LAPD by moving him to a small town in upstate New York, and it hasn't quite worked. She's now set four books on the East Coast and what strikes me is how much the native Californian doesn't have a feel for the place (or the geography - at least she only set a few chapters in her funhouse version of Philadelphia). That, and how she has to stretch to place such gory murders in a small college town.

Walking Shadows opens with the discovery of Brady Neil's body. He's a fairly nondescript guy, works in the warehouse at a Walmart type place, and has never been in trouble. It turns out that his father is serving a life sentence for robbing and murdering a couple who owned a jewelry store in the adjacent small city. Decker and his partner Tyler McAdams (who has completed law school but not yet gotten his bar results) eventually piece together how the father's crime led to the son's death, but it's not neat. Kellerman introduces characters and motives but none of them feel natural. It's a sloppily edited book (a salad changes from one type to another in a single paragraph), and maybe that's the problem. Whether it's a case of an author getting tired of her characters or a publisher cutting back too far on editing, even though I enjoyed Walking Shadows, I did so with an uncomfortable feeling that it should have been much better.

Bone Box

When Faye Kellerman wrote Murder 101, I said that it was probably a good thing that she didn't make Peter Decker's daughter Cindy the new lead of the series because the West Coast native would probably put Philadelphia neighborhoods in the wrong places and that it would make  me angry.  I was right.  No, Ms. Kellerman, a cop and a medical student would NOT live near Rittenhouse Square, and even in University City (which I think you described) they probably wouldn't have a 3 bedroom apartment.  Cindy wouldn't drive to the Roundhouse from Rittenhouse Square or West Philly - traffic and parking prices are both insane and we have SEPTA.  Oh, and you can't leave suburban Cleveland around 11 am and get to Philadelphia before 5.  Getting from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia in under six hours is only possible if you don't stop to pee and don't encounter a construction zone (and there's always a construction zone).

Ms. Kellerman, these are not obscure facts.  A simple check on Zillow for "Rittenhouse Square" and on Google for "drive time between Cleveland and Philadelphia" would have fixed your draft.

I wish geographic errors were my only problems with Bone Box.  I've enjoyed Faye Kellerman's Peter Decker/Rina Lazarus series, but it's a weak, disorganized entry.  It starts well, with Rina literally stumbling across a partially buried skeleton while on a nature hike.  The bones belong to a former student at one of the Five Colleges Consortium, a young man who'd dropped out of one of the colleges to work in finance and had started to transition to being a woman.  Decker and McAdams link this death to another one, and possibly to a pair of related and intermarried couples on the faculties of four of the colleges.  If this sounds improbable, it is.  Kellerman used a similar theme in The Theory of Death, and making it more complex only made it less believable.  Her ventures into the LGBTQ community also felt a bit off, although as an outsider, I can't say anything more specific that the LGBTQ people portrayed didn't feel like real people.  That happens sometimes with minor characters, but the mystery's main victim should be a bit more fleshed out.  I enjoyed parts of Bone Box (the interplay between Decker and McAdams, plus a guest visit by Decker's former partner Marge Dunn), but I'm beginning to question Kellerman's decision to both move Decker to the East Coast and to keep him as an active police detective.  As much as I like her books,  maybe she should have ended the series with Decker's retirement.

The Theory of Death

There's not a lot of violent crime in picturesque small towns - unless you're a mystery writer (or live near the Cabot Cove Serial Killer).  If you're a mystery writer who moves her police lieutenant protagonist to a college town in upstate New York, you should expect a crime wave, or at least annual murders.   In The Theory of Death, the first corpse belongs to Eli Wolf, a Mennonite math genius found naked and shot to death in a clearing in the woods.  Conveniently, Detective Peter Decker's former/future partner Tyler McAdams has escaped Harvard Law to study in the Decker's quiet home. To him, investigating a murder is a break from studying for the degree required by his grandfather's will.  While determining whether Eli's death was murder or suicide, the two stumble upon academic jealousy and fraud, the sexism that plagues academia as well as the rest of the world, an affair, and another dead body.  I thought Kellerman's last book, Murder 101 was a better novel than mystery.  The Theory of Death reverses that, a satisfying mystery that got the non-mystery parts wrong.  For me, it was how Kellerman portrayed science students.  Granted, I'm nearly 30 years removed from Carnegie Mellon, but I'm tired of seeing STEM majors portrayed as socially awkward and blind to anything but their research.  Sure, I knew people like that - but I also knew many students far more well rounded than my law school classmates and the lawyers with whom I've worked.

Murder 101

I predicted Peter Decker's retirement from the LAPD four books ago in Blindman's Bluff.  I was wrong in thinking that he'd retire altogether and that Cindy Decker Kutiel would become the new protagonist.  That's probably a good thing, because Faye Kellerman has relocated Cindy and her NP-turned-med-student husband Kody to Philadelphia and I suspect that the West Coast based author would place neighborhoods in the wrong parts of the city and make Walnut Street run north/south.

Decker hasn't actually retired.  Instead, he's moved to a college town in upstate New York and joined the local police force.  The police deal mainly with small property crimes and sub-critical medical problems - and Tyler McAdams, a rich kid working as a police officer "until I start law school" and mainly to irritate his wealthy and overbearing father.  McAdams is smart, but arrogant and condescending, so naturally Rina invites him to the Shabbat dinner she holds for local students.  That evening, the police chief calls Decker to investigate a break-in at the local cemetery.  It turns out that someone has replaced two of four Louis Comfort Tiffany panels in one of the mausoleums with fakes.  A few days later, a senior art student is found murdered.  The two crimes lead Decker McAdams into the art world and, with some research help from Rina, to a solution I found a bit too abrupt and too wide-ranging to be fully satisfying.

I did, however, enjoy Murder 101 as a novel.  Peter has spent his entire career with experienced detectives, so I enjoyed watching him instruct a rookie in the basics of police work.  The Deckers' East Coast relocation means that they can visit their kids, so they (and we) have dinner with Sammy and his wife Rachel, Jake and his girlfriend Ilana, Hannah and her fiancé Rafe, and Cindy and Kody.  There are even cameo appearances by Marge Dunn (by phone) and Scott Oliver, and McAdams's grandmother, a stereotypical but entertaining grande dame.  The 22nd book in the series made me want to go back and read the first.

The Beast

Faye Kellerman excels at mixing horrific crimes with domestic bliss which still manages to be believable.  The Beast lays a nostalgic gauze over both, as old friends contemplate moving on.  Peter and Rina's children are grown (even their sort-of foster son Gabe Whitman is at Julliard or touring most of the time), as is Marge Dunn's daughter, and even Scott Oliver seems to have settled down.  This is where I expected the series to shift to Cindy Decker Kutiel, but more on that later.  

The Beast features Kellerman's weirdest crime.  A reclusive billionaire has died in a seedy apartment with a full grown tiger.  The tiger turns out to be a red herring; the late Hobart Penny was shot, not mauled, and Penny was a sexually violent sadist.  Kellerman gives us enough clues and misdirection to solve the mystery right before Decker arrests the culprit and manages (barely) to avoid the level of creepiness that led me to stop reading her husband's books.  The plot worked, but felt a bit forced at times, although the scenes at a barely legal animal preserve were interesting and engrossing.

Kellerman's domestic scenes, perhaps intentionally, are almost wistful.  Peter's tired of LA, tired of large crimes, but not ready to retire.  Marge Dunn's long distance relationship is moving towards marriage.  Both detectives are searching for jobs in smaller departments.  Those scenes feel like conversations with old friends, where not everything actually has to be said.  There's a sad tinge, though, to the conversations because the next book won't include the same team.   The domestic scenes aren't perfect - Gabe's scenes with his girlfriend Yasmine feel like a set up for a future plot, and I'm somewhat disappointed that Cindy's husband is entering medical school (he's a nurse practitioner, an important job that doesn't get enough popular notice or respect).  Overall, though, it's a slightly better than average installment in a series that has never slumped, with a nostalgic feel that makes me want to binge-read the series from the beginning.

Gun Games

I don't know what Faye Kellerman has planned for Gabe Whitman.  Is he a replacement for the Deckers' grown children or is he the central character in a story arc within a long running series?  Kellerman introduced Gabe in Hangman.  Kellerman, as usual, deftly integrated Gabe's assimilation into the Deckers' home life and a string of serial killings, but she also brought back Gabe's father Chris Donetti.  Chris is a compelling character, but I find recurring villains unsatisfying and their subsequent appearances forced.  Chris's appearances have avoided extraordinary levels of coincidence so far, but I remain wary.

Gabe takes the lead in Gun Games which devotes equal time and weight to Gabe's personal story and Peter Decker's investigation of a pair of teen suicides.  There's only one obvious connection between Gregory Hesse and Myra Gelb.  They attended the same private school, surrounded by rich kids whose Daddies will buy them out of any trouble.  It's a slightly above average mystery, and Decker, Marge Dunn, and Scott Oliver solve it though the combination of plodding, hunches, and inter-team comfort you expect from people who've worked together for decades.  This time "who" is a bit less of a mystery than "why" or "how" and that's a nice twist on the police procedural.

The detectives also get some help from Gabe.  The brilliant and talented 15-year-old has already complete his high school curriculum and his encounter with the suspects takes place against the backdrop of his clandestine romance with the younger sister of one of Hannah Decker's classmates.  It starts as a non-date date to the opera (Yasmin's sister backed out and if Gabe didn't go, the ticket would go to waste), but soon the sheltered Orthodox 14-year-old and the emotionally battered boy are meeting before school.  This leads to stolen afternoons, frequent text messages, and a violent attack that leads Decker to culprits of the "suicides," as well as the brief appearance of Chris Donetti.  I said at the start of this review that I don't know why Faye Kellerman brought Gabe Whitman into the Deckers' home.  That's not quite true.  I have an idea, but Spoilers, darling.

Hangman

I'm not sure how I feel about recurring criminals.  Any series - mystery or not - will have recurring characters, but even though Faye Kellerman has only used Chris Donetti in three widely spaced books, his presence feels more forced each time.  She introduced him in Justice, as a teenager with perfect pitch and a dark secret who went to prison to spare his girlfriend the trauma of testifying at a murder trial.  She brought him back in Stone Kiss, in his thirties and mixing crime and art and married although not living with his high school lover.  Hangman opens with Chris's wife Terry asking Lt. Peter Decker to act as security while she negotiates a separation from her violent husband.  Six hours later, Terry has disappeared and her and Chris's son Gabe has no one to call but Decker.

The following day, Decker goes out on a call - a young woman has been found hanging from a building site. It's not Terry, but Adrianna Blanc, a neonatal nurse at a local hospital.  Still investigating Terry's disappearance, Decker leads his team in the investigation of what may be the work of a serial killer.  Kellerman gives us two very plausible suspects and then carefully crafts (and supports) an ending surprising enough that she allows her detectives to state exactly how improbable that result actually is.

I know I've complained about the prevalence of subplots in the books I've read over the past few years.  Perhaps those authors should read Kellerman's work because she knows how to weave a personal story into the solution of a gory crime.  Because she started with relatively young characters, Kellerman has allowed them to age in approximately real time.  It's been nearly twenty-five years since The Ritual Bath and Peter's daughter is a police detective, married and expecting her first child, Rina's sons are in their twenties and living on the East Coast, and the couple are facing an empty nest as Hannah prepares for college.  Gabe Whitman has grown up in chaos, with a fiercely protective but emotionally guarded mother and a felonious father who occasionally drops in.  As Hannah tells him, no family is truly normal, but the Decker/Lazarus family is affectionate and stable, giving 14-year-old Gabe his first taste of real family life. I doubt that many authors could so seamlessly combine serial murder, missing persons, an emotionally fragile teen, and a sweetly touching family dinner to celebrate Decker's 60th birthday, but Kellerman manages it quite well.  Hagman is an effective mystery, tinged with just enough nostalgia to make me want to re-read the series from the beginning.

Blindman's Bluff

There's something nostalgic about Blindman's Bluff.  It's Faye Kellerman's 18th Peter Decker/Rina Lazarus Decker novel, and it finally struck me that it's been more than 15 years since I picked up The Ritual Bath while on a layover in Pittsburgh, devoured it, and quickly read the three other books available at that point.  

Back then, Rina was a 20-something widow with two small boys; Peter was a police detective in his late 30s, divorced with a teenage daughter.  We've seen them age in approximately real time, marry, and have a daughter who's now sixteen.  Rina's sons are nearly grown, one in college and the other engaged to a fellow med student, and Peter's daughter is married and after nearly a decade as a police officer has been promoted to detective.  Peter's colleagues are aging too, and the book has a bit of a 'changing of the guard' feel.   I suspect that Peter will retire around book 20, and Detective Cindy Decker Kutiel will follow her father's footsteps into homicide.

That's in the future - in the present, we have the particularly brutal murders of a real estate developer, his wife, and a member of their household staff and the serious wounding of one of their sons.  While Peter deals with department brass and press attention, Rina is serving on a criminal jury.  During a break, one of the court translators (the blind man of the title) asks her to describe two men he's eavesdropping on.  It's a bit too coincidental that they're discussing Peter's case, but Kellerman manages to prevent this from sinking the plot.   She does this by both traditional methods (multiple suspects with multiple motives) and by making the translator seem a little creepy, and maybe a little too interested in Rina.  

Blindman's Bluff is an average entry in the Decker/Lazarus series.  That's actually a complement, because I've enjoyed every one I've read to date.  Peter (with the help of his former partner Marge Dunn and her partner Scott Oliver) solves the case through a combination of plodding and luck, and using only clues which the reader sees.  Maybe Kellerman could have mentioned age a bit less, and I would have liked a phone call from one or both of Rina's sons during the family scenes.  Still, it's an enjoyable, well-paced novel which left me ready for book #19.