Day of Atonement($22.93Value)

Description

Detective team Peter Decker and Rina Lazarus, in Brooklyn for the Jewish High Holy Days after their marriage, find themselves on the trail of an Orthodox teenaged runaway kidnapped by a psychopath When Los Angeles detective Peter Decker and new wife Rina Lazarus visit her Jewish kinfolks in Brooklyn, startling events disturb their honeymoon. Quite unexpectedly and with great antipathy, Decker--an adoptee--recognizes his natural mother at a holiday gathering. Before he can confront her, though, her troubled 14-year-old grandson goes missing and Decker, fortuitously on hand, begins the search. Soon after he learns that the boy has taken up with a dangerously disturbed and vicious young man, the scene switches to Los Angeles. Hard-hitting details, vignettes of Jewish life, and uncomfortably close glimpses of a cold-hearted psycho make this an entrancing page turner. Not to be missed. Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. Such a honeymoon for LAPD Detective Peter Decker and his Orthodox bride, Rina Lazarus (Milk and Honey, 1990, etc.): The Lutheran-raised Peter (Akiva in Brooklyn Yiddish) not only meets up, for the first time, with his birth-mother, Frieda Levine, and her other five progeny, but he also has to scour the Orthodox Jewish communities for his half-nephew Noam/Nick-O, who, feeling stifled at home, has disappeared during the High Holy Days. While Peter canvasses the neighborhood, Nick-O and a meshuggener/psycho, Hersh Schaltz, head for La-La Land, where Hersh filets ``queers'' for quick cash while Nick-O, scared into repentance, whines for his bubbe/grandmother. Then Peter and Rina head for L.A. in pursuit; Rina does some detecting on her own; Peter finds Nick-O and the psycho; and no one, it seems, will live happily ever after, although a couple of characters make appointments with a shrink to straighten themselves out. The Orthodox Jewish community has been done better (and shorter) by Roger Simon and Harry Kemmelman, among others, and Peter's angst at meeting his birth-family is less a tear-jerker than a groan-inducer. Contrived, wordy, and far from Kellerman's best. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.