The Burnt House: A Peter Decker/Rina Lazarus Novel (Peter Decker & Rina Lazarus Novels)

The Burnt House: A Peter Decker/Rina Lazarus Novel (Peter Decker & Rina Lazarus Novels) | Faye Kellerman | Faye Kellerman does it again

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The Burnt House: A...

	The Burnt House: A Peter Decker/Rina Lazarus Novel (Peter Decker & Rina Lazarus Novels) Faye Kellerman William Morrow, 2007 - 448 pages average customer review:based on 46 reviews view larger image
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A Dense Mystery Penetrated by Careful Police Procedure

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!

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Faye Kellerman does it again

I really enjoyed this book. I like Ms Kellerman's characters, Peter and Rina, and her story just keeps you wanting to read more.

Exciting, complex plots and subplots but too many coincidences.

I have read many of Faye Kellerman's Peter Decker/Rina Lazarus novels and enjoyed them. This has a very exciting start with a small commuter plane crashing into an apartment building near the school that Hannah, Peter and Rina's daughter, goes to. All onboard the plane are dead. The airline lists 48 passengers and crew. Forty-eight bodies are recovered but one body is NOT from the crash and had died many years ago. Some of the plots to solve are who is the mystery body and where is the 48th passenger?

There are lots of twists and turns that make at least the first two-thirds of the book very exciting. I did feel that the final denouement was a bit pat and there were a few too many coincidences. Still a good read though.

My real problem is that I didn't feel that Rina Lazarus really had a substantial role in this book as she has had in others. She cooked and she worried and she comforted, which are all great things to do. However, the book jacket said that Peter and Rina's faith would be tested and so on. This didn't happen at all. I would like to see a bigger role for Rina and a few less coincidences.

Recommended but not highly.

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The Burnt House