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.