{"id":3917,"date":"2021-01-10T07:57:53","date_gmt":"2021-01-10T15:57:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/?p=3917"},"modified":"2021-01-10T07:57:53","modified_gmt":"2021-01-10T15:57:53","slug":"faye-kellerman-the-lost-boys","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/faye-kellerman-the-lost-boys\/","title":{"rendered":"Faye Kellerman: The Lost Boys"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>I was a devout acolyte of Faye Kellerman\u2019s early Decker and Lazarus books.\u00a0 The Ritual Bath <\/em>(1986) is, to me, one of the greatest first mysteries ever.\u00a0 In it, Peter Decker, an LAPD detective, encounters the orthodox Jewish Rina Lazarus after a rape and murder at her neighborhood mikvah, or ritual bath.\u00a0 Improbably, the two eventually get married and the series, now 26 books long, is a strong one.\u00a0 The early books were marked by intensity of character discovery, intensity of violence, and Kellerman\u2019s propulsive narrative skill.<\/p>\n

All these many books later, Peter and Rina have aged into a comfortable old married couple with many children and grandchildren, and Peter has retired from the LAPD and taken on a \u201cretirement\u201d job as a detective in upstate New York.\u00a0 I have found through reading many writers who were almost excessively violent in early books \u2013 Karin Slaughter and Val McDermid come to mind \u2013 that as the authors age, the violence becomes less extreme.\u00a0 In the cases of all of these talented writers I stuck with the books, because all of them are extremely well written.<\/p>\n

What hasn\u2019t changed are the wonder of Kellerman\u2019s main characters.\u00a0 All these years later, I love them as much as I did in my first encounter.\u00a0 Rina is that almost perfect woman who isn\u2019t annoying (unlike say, Susan Silverman in the Robert Parker books).\u00a0 Peter is kind \u2013 a kind husband and father, and a kind mentor to his present partner, Tyler McAdams, a recent law school grad who is figuring out his life.\u00a0 Rina and Peter are always worth a visit just on their own.<\/p>\n

What also hasn\u2019t changed is Kellerman\u2019s sure hand with narrative.\u00a0 She sets up her story with a good hook.\u00a0 A developmentally disabled man, Bertram Telemann, has disappeared from a scheduled field trip set up by the home he lives in.\u00a0 The group had gone into the woods to hike and a head count on the bus home comes up one short.<\/p>\n

While looking for Bertram, the police come across some older bones, and a cold case comes into play.\u00a0 Ten years ago, three college students had disappeared on a camping trip in the woods and were never heard from again.\u00a0 Sadly, the bones discovered turn out to belong to one of the missing boys, and Peter and his partner begin to unravel the case.<\/p>\n

Kellerman has such a sure hand she\u2019s able to unspool both stories almost simultaneously, though the story of the boys takes front and center as Decker and his partner reach out to the parents of the missing boys to help them understand what happened.<\/p>\n

Decker announces a change toward the end of the book that made me think this was a series wrap up, but Kellerman leaves a thread to unravel in a future story at the end of the book.\u00a0 She also lays out a possible new direction for the series.\u00a0 Either way this was a book that flew through my reading fingers far too quickly.\u00a0 It also made me remember and appreciate all the reasons I love this series.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was a devout acolyte of Faye Kellerman\u2019s early Decker and Lazarus books.\u00a0 The Ritual Bath (1986) is, to me, one of the greatest first mysteries ever.\u00a0 In it, Peter Decker, an LAPD detective, encounters the orthodox Jewish Rina Lazarus after a rape and murder at her neighborhood mikvah, or ritual bath.\u00a0 Improbably, the two … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[490,309,13,491,291],"class_list":["post-3917","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-decker-lazarus","tag-faye-kellerman","tag-suspensethriller","tag-upstate-new-york","tag-william-morrow"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3917","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3917"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3917\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3919,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3917\/revisions\/3919"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3917"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3917"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3917"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}