Religious Culture Meets Crime in Kellerman’s Newest Mystery

One of the more difficult feats in writing a mystery series is balancing the needs of new readers for a good story on the one hand while providing die-hard fans with fresh insights into beloved characters on the other. When the trick fails, one or the other suffers, resulting in a book that is either too much talk or and not enough action, or just the opposite.

Faye Kellerman has certainly faced these challenges before, having written 12 previous mysteries featuring Baptist-raised LAPD detective Peter Decker and Rina Lazarus, his Jewish Orthodox wife. In the course of these novels, Decker has evolved from considering Rina’s closely knit community “Jewtown” in the first novel to acceptance of his own Jewish heritage. Their unconventional courtship has resulted in an Orthodox marriage, blending two households and three children from previous marriages, and adding a daughter of their own. Decker has been promoted to lieutenant while Rina has deepened her already strong religious commitment by becoming a part-time rabbi. Along the way, they have tracked perpetrators throughout Los Angeles and into Israel and solved the murders of diamond dealers and members of a Heaven’s Gate-like cult, among many more. At their best, Kellerman’s novels blend good police procedure with insights into a society cloistered from most of us, glimpses of Orthodox Jews on La Brea Avenue or Chandler Boulevard notwithstanding.

“The Forgotten” takes Kellerman’s stock elements and weaves them into one of her strongest novels, a story that is both complicated and unsettling. Rina’s synagogue, or shul, is vandalized, sacred texts destroyed and pictures of dead and dying Jews in World War II concentration camps strewn about the sacred space. In short order, Ernesto “Che” Golding, an Ivy League-bound prep schooler and acquaintance of Rina’s son Jacob, is found with a silver kiddush cup, or chalice, stolen from the shul in his backpack.

Ernesto, the son of a wealthy, socially progressive couple, at first will not account for his actions. But when questioned alone by Decker, the boy reveals a troubling discovery he has made while completing a school genealogy project: that Ernesto’s grandfather, Isaac Golding, wasn’t a Holocaust survivor, as his family contends, but was instead perhaps a guard at Treblinka, one of the most horrific of the death camps.

It is a mystery that has dominated Ernesto’s thoughts, may have fueled his involvement with Ruby Ranger, an oversexed, foul-mouthed Goth, and contributed to the vandalism itself. But Decker, while reluctantly accepting the boy’s explanation, subsequent plea bargain and referral for counseling to a couple of high-priced psychologists, still does not believe he acted alone. Kellerman does an excellent job showing how Decker’s uneasy suspicions linger and eventually fade as he meets, at Ernesto’s request, with psychologists Merv and Dee Baldwin--and are rekindled when Ernesto and Merv Baldwin are found brutally murdered.

She does an even better job exploring a community of overachieving, angry teens and their anxious, demanding parents. Through Decker’s and his team of detectives’ interviews, a variety of suspicious families and their offspring are scrutinized--not the least of whom is Decker’s own stepson Jacob, a teenager trapped between the demands of his Orthodox faith and the secular temptations of raves, sex and drugs. Jacob’s scenes with Decker are filled with anger and guilt, suspicion and uneasy truces that will ring only too true for parents and teenagers of all faiths.

At one point in the novel, when Decker is interviewing a troubled teen who may hold the key to the slayings, he thinks of his own stepson. “Somehow it always boiled down to bad parenting. Which made Decker queasy. Sure, there were lots of other explanations. ... But did Decker do all he could do to get the boy through it? All those nights working instead of taking care of business at home.”

It is a worry that this more-than-a-mystery explores in richly rewarding, if occasionally overwhelming, detail.

Yet “God is in the details,” Decker tells his former partner as they tie up loose ends. One might add that confusion is, too, and “The Forgotten” is not without its share. The theorizing by Decker’s team seems a little more protracted than that of most police procedurals, and at times the detectives fail to ask obvious questions of those involved in the case that might eliminate wasted effort. And an occasional Yiddish or Hebrew phrase goes untranslated, forcing the reader to work too hard to understand it solely through the context. Yet “The Forgotten” is one of the best entries in the Decker-Lazarus series, managing to deliver its message while offering up a complex puzzle, a pointed study of overbearing parents and disaffected teens and a genuinely absorbing family drama.