The usually superb Richard Ferrone has done some great narrations in his long career, but his delivery of Kellerman’s latest is a miss. And the book itself takes too long to get to the point. Former LAPD detective Peter Decker and his wife, Rina Lazarus, have moved from California to a small town in upstate New York, where he's become a semi-retired police detective. He and Rina investigate the theft of art from a cemetery followed by the murder of a coed at an elite college. Are the two incidents related? Ferrone’s narration lacks energy and variety in intonation. It’s difficult to distinguish females from males, and he seems to run sentences together. He has excelled in the past in portraying creepy serial killers because of his unusual voice, but his voice and style are inappropriate here. A.L.H. © AudioFile 2014, Portland, Maine

2014-08-14
Retired from the LAPD to be closer to his kids on the East Coast, Detective Peter Decker (The Beast, 2013, etc.), now attached to the Greenbury Police Department, finds just as many felonies in the Five Colleges region of upstate New York. On the whole, the theft of a pair of Tiffany windows from the Bergman family crypt at the local cemetery looks like a professional job. Whoever stole the summer and autumn panels clearly took them one at a time, replacing them with fakes in preparation for stealing winter and spring later on. The fakes themselves, however, are amateurish; even Decker, no art expert, spots one of them as a likely counterfeit before Bergman descendant Ken Sobel and his son-in-law, gallery owner Max Stewart, confirm his suspicions. It's not at all obvious who pulled off the switch, but it's practically certain that the forger was Littleton College art student Angeline Moreau. Sadly, it's too late to question Angeline, who's been brutally murdered. So Decker and his rookie sidekick, insufferable Harvard grad Tyler McAdams, turn their attention to identifying her accomplice as Tufts postgraduate fellow John Latham, and soon enough, he's murdered too. Throughout the complications that follow—which will come to include an intense rivalry among competing art galleries, the unsolved 30-year-old theft of some Russian mosaics, attempts on the two cops' lives, enemy agents and government officials bent on keeping everything quiet—the presence of the initially conceited and clueless McAdams gives Decker an excuse for explaining everything from elementary police procedure to the kiddush blessing over the wine. That's a perfect fit with Kellerman's relentlessly didactic predilections, though longtime fans of the series may grow restless. It's nice to see small-town homicide get Decker's pulse pounding again, though the investigation is routine and the resolution, supplied mostly by Rina Lazarus, Decker's wife, is from hunger.