Hangman

If you're a Kellerman fan, especially of her best-selling and long-running series featuring LAPD Detective Peter Decker and his wife, Rina Lazarus, this latest entry, again mixing police procedural and family drama, should fill the bill. If you're new to Kellerman, though, this is not the place to start. Kellerman works primarily in dialogue, with very sketchy narrative support, which requires readers unfamiliar with the backstory to act as their own detectives, figuring out what the heck is going on in each scene. The plot maintains a breakneck pace we move from the Deckers at dinner getting a call from a distressed teen to the teen's revelation that his parents are missing from their hotel to the further revelation that Decker worked on a homicide case 15 years ago in which the now-absent father falsely confessed to murdering his high-school sweetheart, went to jail, and emerged as a hired killer. There goes dinner. Decker and Lazarus have to track down all these moving pieces. Meanwhile, a neonatal nurse with a wild private life is found brutally murdered. Naturally, we have to confront the fact that there may be a serial killer at work. Fans of Joseph Wambaugh will find a very different LAPD here less credible and certainly far less funny than the one he presents. Still, the family-drama side of this series is its main appeal to fans, and that's what will get them through a less-than-stellar effort.--Fletcher, Connie Copyright 2010 Booklist

Kellerman once again mixes mystery and soap opera in her 19th novel featuring Lt. Peter Decker of the LAPD and his wife, Rina Lazarus (after Blindman's Bluff). Terry McLaughlin, a doctor and battered wife, asks Decker, who's an old friend, to help mediate a meeting with her abusive husband. When McLaughlin disappears soon after the meeting, her 14-year-old son, Gabe, a gifted piano prodigy, is left on his own. Welcomed into the Decker/Lazarus household, Gabe is allowed to attend their youngest daughter's Jewish day school, even though he's Catholic. Meanwhile, Decker fears that an unidentified woman who's found hanged at a construction site may be Gabe's mother. Readers should be prepared for some unconvincing police procedure (members of Decker's team obliviously contaminate a crime scene) and some stilted prose ("Everything works out. Sometimes it works out good. And sometimes it works out bad. It's the bad that concerns me"), but series fans will cheer the serendipitous developments that lead to a better life for Gabe. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Even though he's working an endless homicide, LAPD Lt. Peter Decker celebrates his 60th birthday by opening his house to a new child.Believing that she'd had an abortion, Chris Donatti got into a shouting match with his wife, St. Timothy's ER physician Teresa McLaughlin. The episode would be forgettable if the argument hadn't erupted in violence and if Donatti, whom Decker first encountered 15 years ago, weren't a professional killer. Now Terry, afraid to be alone with him, begs Decker to sit in on the meeting in which she announces the terms of their separation. When she disappears the next day, the case becomes Decker's. So does the responsibility for Gabe, her 14-year-old son (though not necessarily Donatti's), who moves into Decker's house for just one night and then stays on at the insistence of Rina Lazarus, Decker's wife. And so does the death of Adrianna Blanc, a pediatric nurse at St. Tim's whose corpse is found hanging from a construction site around the corner. Adrianna's strangling, which seems linked to every felony committed in southern California and greater Las Vegas over a two-year period, ought to absorb every ounce of Decker's attention. But even though it leads him to a dozen blind alleys and two independent serial killers, it's the fate of Gabe, a gifted piano prodigy who's had to grow up awfully fast, that's more engaging.The mystery depends on too many coincidences to take it seriously, but Kellerman (Blindman's Bluff, 2009, etc.) is more interested in the domestic details anyway.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.