by Alysa Dudley

Created on: October 09, 2010   Last Updated: October 11, 2010

The Mercedes Coffin is the seventeenth book in Faye Kellerman’s “Decker and Lazarus” series.  Detective Peter Decker and his wife, Rina Lazarus, live in Los Angeles.   Kellerman’s first book in this series – The Ritual Bath – was published in 1986.  Faye Kellerman has continued to delight readers with the cases Decker works on and the growth of his relationship with Rina and their family.  

To readers of the Decker and Lazarus series, there are some familiar characters.  Detectives Marge Dunn and Scott Oliver are there to help Decker with the legwork.  Rina and Peter’s daughter Hannah is now a teenager, and Decker’s daughter from his first marriage is now Detective Cindy Kutiel stationed in Hollywood.  New characters include Arnold Lamar and Calvin Vitton, the detectives on the Ben Little Case.  

There are two crimes to be solved in The Mercedes Coffin, a recent one and a case 15 years old.  The current case involves a seemingly carjacked Mercedes Benz with a body in the trunk, the case from 15 years ago has the same features.  Bennett Alston Little, a teacher at a local high school, was killed 15 years ago and found in the trunk of his car.  Genoa Greeves, now wealthy, sees the similarities of the two cases and asks the police department to look into Little’s cold case once again.  She offers the police department a new computer system as an incentive.

As the story proceeds, Decker contacts active and retired detectives, and gets help from his daughter, Cindy.  At first the two cases, occurring 15 years apart, share only a few similarities.  With many characters to investigate, there is a web of relationships and possibilities which Kellerman expertly develops throughout the novel.  Eventually, the connections between the two cases comes to light.

The investigation involves contacting a variety of characters.  Starting with Vitton and Lamar, Decker, Oliver and Dunn talk with Ben’s wife, the private detective she hired, and  some of Little’s former students.  The current case involves the death of Primo Eckerling,  a member of a briefly popular band engagingly named The Doodoo Sluts.  

Kellerman does a good job of developing the many characters in the book.  The discussions between the various characters seamlessly highlight the progress of the investigation.  The climax of the story, however, is disappointing.  A good mystery has a twist near the end which the reader doesn’t see coming.  In The Mercedes Coffin the climax seems predictable, leaving the reader wondering what else is going to happen.

If one has been reading the Decker and Lazarus series and plans to continue doing so, the book is worth reading to keep up with the continuing development of the main characters.  It is not, however, one of Kellerman’s better novels in the series.

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