The Burnt House

The return of Peter and Rina Decker is always welcome. It combines good police procedure and the smell of good food. This novel is no exception. It begins with the crash of a small commuter plane out of Burbank (Bob Hope) airport early one morning and the supposed death of an airline steward. When all the victims are accounted for, her body is not identified, although the remains of bones beneath the destroyed structure into which the plane plunged are discovered. Thus begins the hunt for the truth behind the disappearance of two women. The skeleton is finally identified as someone gone missing thirty years before. The stewardess' body remains the subject of a continued search. Is the husband somehow responsible for her disappearance or even her possible murder? Or is it a contractor in San Jose with whom she had a brief affair? What started out as two unrelated incidents draws Decker and his team back and forth to San Jose and New Mexico in an effort to uncover 30-year-old information in attempt to solve the cases. With more questions than answers the investigation unearths more dead ends than answers. But perseverance is virtue that pays off in the end. And the interrelationship of Peter and Rina is on display deeply, as she provides a sounding board to guide him both supernaturally and professionally. Tightly plotted and well-written, the series remains a joy to read.

This book is one of her best. It will keep you guessing until the end. Highly recommended if you liked her others.

I really enjoyed this story which is almost two stories in one. A plane crashes just after take-off, into an apartment building, incinerating everybody on the plane and in the building. A question arises about whether or not an off-duty stewardess was aboard as an unlisted passenger which is what is claimed by her husband. There's a discrepancy about all of this and so Detective Peter Decker and his team are called in to investigate. The husband of the missing stewardess would have been made penniless by his impending divorce and, by swearing that he knew that she was aboard, benefits greatly from her will and insurance. When the team finds another body in the burned out building, the trail goes back 30 years and another murder mystery is uncovered. It's an exciting, fast paced read with lots of interesting detail and even descriptions of Jewish and Mexican food and rituals.

This book will delight those who like mysteries that are very difficult to solve before the author reveals the story's resolution. If you mainly read the Peter Decker/Rina Lazarus books to focus on their life together, you'll think this is one of the worst books in the series. If you like puzzles, however, you'll feel fully rewarded by the challenging of determining what happened to flight attendant, Roseanne Dresden. Along the way, you'll pick up some unexpected twists that also make for good mystery reading. This plot relies on a lot of coincidences. That can be troubling for a reader to swallow, but in real life coincidence occurs so often that we often don't even bother to remark on it. There is a subgenre of police procedural that relies on having more than one case mixed up in an investigation. I thought that the premise for this mystery was stronger than most books in that subgenre. But what distinguished the book was that the resolutions proved to be so difficult to anticipate. I dislike mysteries where you can see the solution beginning to take shape around page 50. In this case, Ms. Kellerman did an excellent job of keeping the resolution hidden until very near the end. From reading this book, I hope that Ms. Kellerman will write more books that contain difficult puzzles whose solutions only gradually reveal themselves through police investigations. Bravo, Ms. Kellerman!

Since flight attendant Rosanne Dresden's remains were not in the wreckage from the communter plane which crashed into an apartment house in Granada Hills, CA, where is she? That is Homicide Detective Peter Decker's problem to figure out in this great addition to this series. Her husband and lover both look suspicious, but what is their motive? Finally, when a female's body is found in the ashes, Decker has to identify her and discovers another mystery--only this one is 30 years old. This is a great police procedural that kept me reading into the night. This series about Peter Decker just keeps getting better.