K for Kellerman

This is a very late post for our weekly alphabet meme, but I have been quite busy for days, trying to arrange my Global Reading Challenge.

I own two books in Faye Kellerman´s American series about Sergeant Peter Decker and his sidekick, the teacher and orthodox Jew, Rina Lazarus, and have read a handful from the library in the 1990s when the series was published in Danish.

The first story is The Ritual Bath, published in 1986 (dansk titel: Det rituelle bad, 1997). A Jewish woman, Sarah Libba, is assaulted and raped inside the Jewish community, an enclosed area within Los Angeles. Peter Decker and his female colleague, Marge Dunn, are put on the case. They feel strange and uncomfortable among the orthodox Jews, but do their best to help the victim and solve the case.

Apart from it being a well-written and interesting police procedural series, the attraction of this one is the depiction of an environment which – to me at least – is a novelty. I enjoyed meeting Rina Lazarus, the young widow, who struggles to be loyal to her own religion and culture, but who is also attracted to Decker, the sympathetic and conscientious policeman who belongs to a non-Jewish, modern American world.

On my shelf is also the second novel, Sacred and Profane, published in 1987 (dansk: Helligt og profant, 1998). In this one, Peter Decker is camping together with Rina Lazarus´ two sons when they find the bodies of two young girls. Decker seems to have figured out how to gain access to a mother´s heart.

An enjoyable series with a couple of detectives I want to read more about.