Detective Fiction, Thrillers, Crimes - Fiction, Crime Fiction

Serpent's Tooth (Peter Decker and Rina Lazarus Series #10)

Name: Serpent's Tooth (Peter Decker and Rina Lazarus Series #10)
Author: Faye Kellerman
ISBN: 9780062087881

by Faye Kellerman

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Overview

A lone gunman walks into a trendy L.A. restaurant, and seconds later a terrifying mass murder transforms it into a slaughterhouse. Even Lieutenant Peter Decker, with over twenty years of law enforcement experience, is horrified at the sight of the dead and injured. Enough of the triggerman's face remains to identify him as former bartender and would-be actor Harlan Manz. In the aftermath of the tragedy, the papers paint Manz as a psycho and the families want closure on the case, but the obvious information about Manz doesn't satisfy Peter Decker. Could there be another explanation? Another killer? As Decker relentlessly pursues the crime, he is thrust into the lurid world of moneyed Southern California, where everything can be bought.

About the Author, Faye Kellerman

Faye Kellerman is the author of twenty-seven novels, including twenty New York Times bestselling mysteries that feature the husband-and-wife team of Peter Decker and Rina Lazarus. She has also penned two bestselling short novels with her husband, New York Times bestselling author Jonathan Kellerman, and recently teamed up with her daughter Aliza to cowrite a young adult novel, Prism—the story of four teens in an alternate universe. She lives with her husband in Los Angeles, California, and Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Biography

It's tempting to compare Peter Decker and Rina Lazarus to Dashiell Hammett's classic crime-solving couple, Nick and Nora Charles. But Faye Kellerman's duo, who debuted in 1983, bear more resemblance to her own husband-wife dynamic with fellow bestselling thriller author Jonathan Kellerman. Decker is an L.A. cop; wife Rina is an Orthodox Jewish mom who gets very involved in her husband's work. The series comes with a love story built in, since in the first title, Ritual Bath, Lazarus is a witness meeting Detective Decker for the first time. Over the next dozen-odd novels, the two fall in love, get married, have children and solve crimes along the way.

Kellerman, who was inspired by her husband to begin writing, is also the author of Moon Music, a contemporary thriller set in Las Vegas, and The Quality of Mercy, a historical novel of Elizabethan England. Fans needn't worry, however, that Kellerman is going to abandon the pair she is best known for. "I never tire of them," Kellerman says in an interview on her publisher's web site of Decker and Lazarus. "I like them very much, but to keep them fresh is the main reason why I have two 'outside-the-series' or 'stand alone' books. Once in a while you have to sit back and gain some perspective on these people that you are writing about year after year."

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Editorials

People

Readers will be frantically flipping pages. .

San Francisco Examiner

One of the best in the series. . . .

Detroit News

Reading a good thriller is very much like taking a great vacation: half the fun is getting there. Faye Kellerman is one heck of a tour guide. .

S.E. Warwick

...[W]eaves the gritty reality of contemporary Los Angeles and the ancient covenants of Orthodox Judaism into a complex tale that is both entertaining and educational....Kellerman throws in just enough details from Decker’s home life to let us know that like anything else, being a homicide detective is a job, more demanding than many, but still a means to put bread on the table....[B]lends character and plot into a satisfying whole.
— Mystery Magazine Online \ \ \

Publishers Weekly

Layering crisis upon crisis, Kellerman builds a page-turner in this 10th Peter Decker and Rina Lazarus novel, which, like previous titles in the series (most recently Prayers for the Dead), is based on a complex, carefully established network of relationships. A former employee of a ritzy restaurant opens fire there, killing 13 people and wounding dozens; then he commits suicide. Or so it seems, until LAPD Lieutenant Peter Decker and his team spot inconsistencies. Fatal bullets came from several directions; a single gunman could not have sprayed so many shots; and one murdered couple left an estate worth millions. Decker suspects their daughter, Jeanine Garrison, a beautiful but manipulative charity organizer with penchants for power and handsome young tennis players. He connects her with a suspected killer, but she pressures police brass to back off and then hits the detective with a bogus sexual harassment complaint. When a mysterious drug overdose kills her brother, Jeanine gets the entire inheritance. While Decker struggles with the murders (the grisly killings trigger Vietnam flashbacks) and departmental politics, his older daughter from his first marriage, Cindy, decides to become a cop. Decker is appalled, but Cindy's ambition could help crack the case. Decker's wife, Rina Lazarus, stands on the sidelines here, trying to smooth relations between their Orthodox Jewish household and Decker's adoptive Baptist family, until it's she who makes use of her husband's past to reveal the final piece of the puzzle. Lots of action, an intricate plot and credible, multi-dimensional characters make this another standout entry in an evolving series.

Library Journal

Kellerman's (Prayers for the Dead, LJ 8/96) popular L.A. detective duo here investigate a Southern California-style mass murder in a trendy restaurant.

S.E. Warwick

Kirkus Reviews

Why would somebody walk into trendy Estelle's and spray the diners with gunfire, killing 13 of them and wounding 32? Even when the shooter's identified as Harlan Manz, disgruntled former Estelle's bartender, Lt. Peter Decker's not satisfied—especially when forensics start to paint a picture of a second gunman. And that means a plan; it probably means murder for hire, with the first gunman recast as the last victim. But when Decker's team, investigating the dead diners' links to Manz's former employer, the Greenvale Country Club, strike gold—Manz's sometime tennis partner, charity fund-raiser Jeanine Garrison, inherited millions when her parents were killed at Estelle's—the case blows up in their face: Manipulative Jeanine blows hot and cold when Decker questions her, then trumps up a harassment suit against him and succeeds in getting him lifted from the case. Doubly determined to nail her, Decker pulls out all the stops running down possible links between her and the second shooter. Meantime, his loyal wife Rina Lazarus and his daughter Cindy (who's already antagonized her father by announcing that she's been accepted at the Police Academy) huddle with their own freelance operatives to back up his hunch. Anybody care to place a bet on the battle between the Decker family and the oh-so-charming psychopath Jeanine?

Nail-biting detective work, though the results rather undermine the suspicions that put Decker on the culprit's scent in the first place. Midlevel Kellerman, not up to Prayers for the Dead (1996), but well ahead of her soapier Decker-Lazarus domestic dramas.