Bone Box (Peter Decker and Rina Lazarus Series #24)

by Faye Kellerman

Overview

“Hands down, the most refreshing mystery couple around.” —People

On a crisp September morning, while walking a bucolic woodland trail, Rina stumbles upon human remains once buried deep beneath the forest floor. Immediately, she calls her husband, Peter Decker, a former detective lieutenant with the LAPD now working for the local Greenbury Police. The body has been interred for years and there is scant physical evidence at the gravesite: a youthful skeleton, a skull wound, and long, dark strands of hair surrounding the bones. As Decker and his partner, Tyler McAdams, investigate further, they realize that they’re most likely dealing with a missing student from the nearby Five Colleges of Upstate—a well-known and well-respected consortium of higher learning.

And when more human remains are found in the same area, Decker and McAdams know this isn’t just a one-off murder case. Short-staffed and with no convenient entrée into the colleges, Decker enlists Rina’s help to act as his eyes and ears on campus. Winding their way through a dangerous labyrinth of steely suspects and untouchable academics, Decker, McAdams, and Rina race to protect their community from a psychopathic killer still in the area—and on the hunt for a fresh victim.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062424976
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	07/25/2017
Series:	Peter Decker and Rina Lazarus Series , #24
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	496
Product dimensions:	4.10(w) x 7.40(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Faye Kellerman lives with her husband, New York Times bestselling author Jonathan Kellerman, in Los Angeles, California, and Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Hometown:

Beverly Hills, California

Date of Birth:

July 31, 1952

Place of Birth:

St. Louis, Missouri

Education:

B.A. in Mathematics, 1974; D.D.A., 1978

Editorial Reviews

12/19/2016
In bestseller Kellerman’s so-so 24th novel featuring Peter Decker, a retired LAPD homicide detective who now works for the Greenbury, N.Y., police, and his wife, Rina Lazarus (after 2015’s The Theory of Death), a routine morning hike for Rina becomes the catalyst for the search for a serial killer after she accidentally steps on skeletal remains, which may belong to one of several students reported missing in recent years from the so-called Five Colleges of Upstate. Peter and his sidekick, Tyler McAdams, an affluent law student who’s spending his summer with the police and has become a virtual family member, investigate; the pair eventually identify the victim, before more skeletons are unearthed in the area of the original find. Rina inserts herself into the case, despite her husband’s fears for her safety. The plot line unfolds predictably, and there’s no real emotional tension, despite a spat between Peter and Rina over watching TV. Series fans will be pleased to learn that the couple’s twin grandsons, although only seven, are basketball prodigies at their Philadelphia school. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

09/15/2016
After Rina Lazarus finds a body in the woods, husband Peter Decker of the Greenbury, NY, police identifies the victim as a student from the area's Five Colleges of Upstate. More bodies turn up, and Peter asks Rina to act as his eyes and ears at the schools, where she works. With a 100,000-copy first printing.

Library Journal

Rina Lazarus’s discovery of human bones in the woods leads her husband, Detective Peter Decker, to try to determine the identities of the victim and the killer. Narrator Richard Ferrone uses appropriately softened tones to show the relationship between the couple, and he also captures subtle moments as the main characters interact with minor ones. Though his voices for women could use a bit more differentiation, he does especially well with a whiny college professor and a private bodyguard, whose voices deftly reflect their personalities. As Decker and his former partner chase assorted leads to zero in on the killer, secondary characters from Decker and Lazarus’s past slip in and out of the plot, offering fodder for a well-crafted narration. The audiobook is part of the author’s running series. M.B. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine

APRIL 2017 - AudioFile

2016-12-08
An unwelcome discovery Rina Lazarus makes on a woodsy trail begins what feels like an endless new investigation for her husband, Greenbury Police Detective Peter Decker (The Theory of Death, 2015, etc.). The skeletal hand Rina steps on has clearly been buried, not entirely successfully, for years, and the first challenge for the little Greenbury force is to figure out who the victim was and which of the fictitious Five Colleges she came from. The initial assumption that the corpse is female turns out to be only half-right, or both right and wrong: it's Lawrence Pettigrew, who dropped out of Morse McKinley seven years ago for the gender reassignment surgery that would make her Lorraine. Pettigrew's ambiguous gender status—she identified as female and took female hormones but never went through with the last surgical procedure that would have completed her transition—is only the first of several intriguing matters Kellerman raises but doesn't resolve. Instead, the case circles back to the past when another corpse is improbably discovered 100 yards away: that of Delilah Occum, who vanished from Clarion College three years ago. It's a good thing Rina can use her contacts at Hillel to supply Decker and his very junior partner, Harvard Law student Tyler McAdams, with a list of students who've gone missing from the Five Colleges over the years, because there's no sign that the murders are over, and everyone in the area, from charismatic professors to drug suppliers to horny boyfriends, seems to be involved. The wide net Decker is forced to cast leads to false starts, dead ends, and eventually multiple arrests and several far more satisfying hours of sweating the perps in interrogation rooms just in time for Rina to turn away from her much-remarked handguns (are you listening, Anton Chekhov?) and start cooking for Rosh Hashana. A low-concept small-town procedural that delivers more authenticity than suspense, with so many forgettable suspects, witnesses, and potential victims that you'll need a grade book to keep them straight.

Kirkus Reviews