The Ritual Bath
The First Decker/Lazarus Novel
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Beschreibung des Verlags
Detective Peter Decker of the LAPD is stunned when he gets the report. Someone has shattered the sanctuary of a remote yeshiva community in the California hills with an unimaginable crime. One of the women was brutally raped as she returned from the mikvah, the bathhouse where the cleansing ritual is performed.
The crime was called in by Rina Lazarus, and Decker is relieved to discover that she is a calm and intelligent witness. She is also the only one in the sheltered community willing to speak of this unspeakable violation. As Rina tries to steer Decker through the maze of religious laws the two grow closer. But before they get to the bottom of this horrendous crime, revelations come to light that are so shocking that they threaten to come between the hard-nosed cop and the deeply religious woman with whom he has become irrevocably linked.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Baptist big cop Peter Decker is reduced to jelly by tiny Jewish jewel Rina Lazarus, mistress of a ritual bathhouse in Los Angeles, on whose grounds a rape, which Decker is investigating, has just taken place. When she's not scrubbing out the mikvah, Rina, widowed mother of two sons, teaches math at the yeshiva, where several of those suspected of the rape and later of a particularly hideous murder either teach or study the Torah. Despite detective Decker's instant bedazzlement, however, Rina's orthodox charms and pious invocations to the deity are pretty subfusc; the entire cast is so jejune that the reader doesn't give a rap whodunit. Thus, the principle of the murder mystery genre is violated, the more seriously by the author's ambiguity as to whether she is writing a romance, a homily on the practices and virtues of observant Judaism or a detective novel.
