Milk and Honey (Peter Decker and Rina Lazarus Series #3) » (Reprint)

Love is serious business in Faye Kellerman's murder mysteries, starring sleuthing couple Rina Lazarus and Peter Decker. Kellerman spices her hardboiled crime stories with issues involving modern Judaism (Rina is Orthodox), putting a unique spin on the mystery genre in both this series and two separate but similarly successful novels, Moon Music and The Quality of Mercy.

In the silent pre-dawn city hours -- alone with his thoughts about Rina Lazarus, the woman he loves, three thousand miles away in New York -- LAPD detective Peter Decker finds a small child, abandoned and covered in blood that is not hers. It is a sobering discovery, and a perplexing one, for nobody in the development where she was found steps forward to claim the little girl. Obsessed more deeply by this case than he imagined possible, Decker is determined to follow the scant clues to an answer. But his trail is leading him to a killing ground where four bodies lie still and lifeless. And by the time Rina returns, Peter Decker is already held fast in a sticky mass of hatred, passion, and murder -- in a world where intense sweetness is accompanied by a deadly sting.

Publishers Weekly

On a summer night in a housing development near Los Angeles, police sergeant Peter Decker finds a winsome two-year-old girl playing on a swing set--and wearing blood-soaked pajamas. Unclaimed, ``Sally'' is placed in a foster home while Decker and partner Marge Dunn try to learn her identity. Bee stings on her arms lead them days later to the scene of a bloody multiple murder at a honey farm. While piecing together a bizarre puzzle of betrayal and revenge which includes adultery, infertility and land development plans, Peter is also investigating rape and assault charges brought against an old army buddy from Vietnam. The pressures of the murder case and doubts about his friend's innocence compound Peter's anxiety as he waits for young Orthodox Jewish widow Rina Lazarus to decide if she will marry him--an older man who's only recently embraced his Jewish heritage. Kellerman weaves these threads into a believable, intricate mystery in which series hero Decker is revealed as even more complex, interesting and sympathetic than in earlier appearances ( Sacred and Profane ). Mystery Guild selection; Literary Guild alternate; author tour. (Apr.)