Kellerman's fourth mystery to feature Peter Decker and Rina Lazarus lacks the passion and suspense of earlier outings. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Such a honeymoon for LAPD Detective Peter Decker and his Orthodox bride, Rina Lazarus (Milk and Honey, 1990, etc.): The Lutheran-raised Peter (Akiva in Brooklyn Yiddish) not only meets up, for the first time, with his birth-mother, Frieda Levine, and her other five progeny, but he also has to scour the Orthodox Jewish communities for his half-nephew Noam/Nick-O, who, feeling stifled at home, has disappeared during the High Holy Days. While Peter canvasses the neighborhood, Nick-O and a meshuggener/psycho, Hersh Schaltz, head for La-La Land, where Hersh filets ``queers'' for quick cash while Nick-O, scared into repentance, whines for his bubbe/grandmother. Then Peter and Rina head for L.A. in pursuit; Rina does some detecting on her own; Peter finds Nick-O and the psycho; and no one, it seems, will live happily ever after, although a couple of characters make appointments with a shrink to straighten themselves out. The Orthodox Jewish community has been done better (and shorter) by Roger Simon and Harry Kemmelman, among others, and Peter's angst at meeting his birth-family is less a tear-jerker than a groan-inducer. Contrived, wordy, and far from Kellerman's best.

Two shocks await L.A.-cop-turned-Orthodox-Jew Peter Decker as he visits his wife Rina Lazarus' in-laws from her first marriage. A woman he never expected to see again is there for dinner, and Noam, a teenage cousin, vanishes before the elaborate ceremonies of the High Holy Days are concluded. The family is thrown into chaos, fights over orthodoxy and conservatism are shelved, and Decker, even wearing his robes and yarmulke, is a cop with a mission once more. Atonement, like the three previous Decker/Lazarus books, mixes Jewish lore with a gripping crime plot. With Decker and Lazarus now married, Kellerman can't rely on the vicissitudes of their on-off courtship to keep things lively. Still, there's more than enough here to keep readers involved: freewheeling shifts from cutting fish to cutting bodies, elaborate revenge schemes devised to right unnamed wrongs, and the visceral tension that springs from watching the pious Decker forced to descend once again into the moral sludge. This graphic, pungent novel shows Kellerman at the gritty peak of her form. ~--Peter Robertson

When Los Angeles detective Peter Decker and new wife Rina Lazarus visit her Jewish kinfolks in Brooklyn, startling events disturb their honeymoon. Quite unexpectedly and with great antipathy, Decker--an adoptee--recognizes his natural mother at a holiday gathering. Before he can confront her, though, her troubled 14-year-old grandson goes missing and Decker, fortuitously on hand, begins the search. Soon after he learns that the boy has taken up with a dangerously disturbed and vicious young man, the scene switches to Los Angeles. Hard-hitting details, vignettes of Jewish life, and uncomfortably close glimpses of a cold-hearted psycho make this an entrancing page turner. Not to be missed. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.