The Burnt House (Peter Decker and Rina Lazarus Series #16)

At 8:15 in the morning, a small commuter plane carrying forty-seven passengers crashes into an apartment building in Granada Hills, California. Shock waves ripple through Los Angeles as L.A.P.D. Lieutenant Peter Decker works overtime to calm rampant fears of a 9/11-type terror attack. But a grisly mystery lives inside the plane's charred and twisted wreckage.

The fate of an unaccounted-for flight attendant—twenty-eight-year-old Roseanne Dresden—remains a question mark more than a month after the horrific event, when the young woman's irate stepfather calls, insisting that she was never onboard the doomed plane. Instead, he claims, she was most likely murdered by her abusive, unfaithful husband. But why, then, was Roseanne's name included on the passenger list?

As the jagged pieces slowly fall into place, a frightening picture begins to form: a mind-searing portrait of unimaginable evil that will challenge Decker's and Rina's own beliefs about guilt and innocence and justice.

At 8:15 A.M., a small commuter plane carrying forty-seven passengers crashes into an apartment building in Granada Hills, California. Among the dead inside the plane's charred and twisted wreckage are the unidentified bodies of four extra travelers. And there's no sign of an airline employee whose name was on the passengers list.

L.A.P.D. Detective Peter Decker and his wife, Rina, areprofoundly shaken by this terrible "accident" that has occurred frighteningly close to their daughter's school. And an irate call from the unaccounted-for flight attendant's stepfather further tangles an already twisted mystery. The man insists twenty-eight-year-old Roseanne Dresden was never on the doomed flight, but was probably murdered by her abusive, unfaithful husband—a revelation that propels Decker down a path of tragic history and deadly lies toward an unimaginable evil that will challenge his and Rina's cherished beliefs about guilt and innocence and justice.

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

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."