At one point it looked as if Faye Kellerman would outstrip husband Jonathan, the writer of the better-known Alex Delaware series. Hubby seemed to go off the boil, introducing some increasingly ludicrous plots and really not advancing his characters much at all. Mrs K sneaked up on the rails with the faintly unlikely but intriguing pairing of homicide detective Pete Decker and his orthodox Jewish wife Rina.
Some way down the line, though, the Decker family are looking increasingly ragged and in need of a rest. The strains of fatherhood are starting to tell on poor old Pete, whilst Rina is rapidly turning into one of the most irritating leading characters in modern crime fiction. I’m all for feisty heroines ploughing their own furrow, but I have a sneaking suspicion that I’m not reacting to Rina as the author would want. The all-too-perfect Mrs Decker, not content with being an A1 mother and wife and a pillar of the synagogue, also pokes her nose into Pete’s murder inquiry.
Sara Paretsky’s new book Total Recall touches on the same territory as Kellerman – but with far more success. In the right hands, The Forgotten’s plot of right-wing extremists, the Holocaust, over-privileged rich kids and family secrets should be electric. But Kellerman simply doesn't have the same lightness of touch and feeling for her characters as Paretsky. The main problem is her over-blown and over-wrought writing. In Kellerman’s hands the reader reels away feeling like they’ve been clobbered over the head once too often. She hasn’t quite grasped that less is very often more.
That said, I was compelled to keep on listening – and that was due in no small part to Jeff Harding’s reading. I’m no expert on American accents (I can spot New Yawk and deep south and that’s it), but I had no trouble at all differentiating between the large supporting cast, many of them youngsters. He had a few rocky moments early on with the women – or maybe he simply meant to give Rina an irritating whine!
So, this is the audio version of a page-turner in that Kellerman can tell a
tale. What she can’t do is subtlety. She raises a number of issues – including
religious tolerance and the potentially fascinating one of an orthodox Jewish
teenager struggling with his faith in 21st century America – but never leaves
the reader feeling she’s done them justice.
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Sharon Wheeler
There are 14 books in the series featuring Pete Decker and Rina Lazarus.