Murder 101

July 14, 2014
Art theft provides the theme for bestseller Kellerman’s deftly researched 22nd Peter Dekker/Rina Lazarus novel (after 2013’s The Beast). Dekker, recently retired from the LAPD, has traded palm trees and sunshine for the snowy winters of upstate New York, taking a job in law enforcement in the sleepy college town of Greenbury. The effect of Dekker’s Orthodox Jewish beliefs add color to the narrative: for example, when he looks into a theft from a cemetery, it’s Shabbat, so he has to travel on foot, instead of by car. After two homicides in the area, Dekker picks up the trail of an art thief whose sights are set higher than a few graveyard treasures. While Kellerman includes too many unimportant details in the story, whether the description of an apartment’s heating system or an unappetizing kosher dinner, her skillful development of characters, both old and new, somewhat atones for this, and almost excuses this installment’s lapses in tension.

September 1, 2014
Retired from the LAPD to be closer to his kids on the East Coast, Detective Peter Decker (The Beast, 2013, etc.), now attached to the Greenbury Police Department, 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 summer and autumn panels clearly took them one at a time, replacing them with fakes in preparation for stealing winter and spring later on. The fakes themselves, however, are amateurish; even Decker, no art expert, spots one of them as a likely 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. Sadly, it's too late to question Angeline, who's been brutally murdered. So Decker and his rookie sidekick, insufferable Harvard grad Tyler McAdams, turn their attention to identifying her accomplice as Tufts postgraduate fellow John Latham, and soon enough, he's murdered too. Throughout the complications that follow-which will come to include an intense rivalry among competing art galleries, the unsolved 30-year-old theft of some Russian mosaics, attempts on the two cops' lives, enemy agents and government officials bent on keeping everything quiet-the presence of the initially conceited and clueless McAdams gives Decker an excuse for explaining everything from elementary police procedure to the kiddush blessing over the wine. That's a perfect fit with Kellerman's relentlessly didactic predilections, though longtime fans of the series may grow restless. It's nice to see small-town homicide get Decker's pulse pounding again, though the investigation is routine and the resolution, supplied mostly by Rina Lazarus, Decker's wife, is from hunger.

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