Publishers Weekly
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.)
Library Journal
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.
APRIL 2017 - AudioFile
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
Kirkus Reviews
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.
