โ Scribed by Faye Kellerman
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
In the bleak wasteland of the Nevada desert, not far from the sparkling, 24-hour neon of the world famous Las Vegas Strip, the body of a once-beautiiful showgirl is discovered, horribly mauled and mutilated. It is a horrendous crime, shocking in its brutality, excessive even for a city celebrated for its excess. Seasoned police veteran and Vegas native Detective Sergeant Romulus Poe has seen his fair share of depravity in this mecca of glitz and vice. But there is something about this unfortunate young woman's death -- and in a similar murder that is to follow soon after -- that harkens back to an unsolved slaying and so-called suicide a quarter-century ago. The grim similarities -- along with some frightening new possibilities -- are leading Poe into a night world of dark shadows best left unilluminated..and pulling the inquisitive policeman toward secrets from a strange and sordid past that could destroy those closest to him, and drag him over the edge.
In Moon Music Faye Kellerman turns her attention from the streets of Los Angeles, where her previous novels were set, to the casinos of Las Vegas. A mutilated body of a young woman is discovered in the desert and Detective Sergeant Romulus Poe sets out to determine who could have committed the murder and the brutal desecration that followed. His team of investigators include the tall and lusty Steve Jensen, novice Patricia Deluca, and medical examiner Rukmani Kalil. The relations between the four are complex and add depth to this tale of deadly dealings: Poe carries a torch for Jensen's mentally troubled wife and knows of his colleague's philandering; Kalil and Poe are engaged in an off-again, on-again affair. Although collectively they feel as though they are making progress in the case, another similarly mutilated corpse is found within a matter of weeks, turning the mystery from that of a peculiarly brutal murder in the singular to the search for a serial killer.
It's a tight, tense read. Kellerman engages the reader with her carefully wrought characters and with her sense of place. Las Vegas not only sets the stage for the story but is central to it. The seeds of the crime were planted in its small town past as a nuclear test sight and only reach their fruition in the gambling and selling of sex and drugs in the present. Kellerman ties it all together beautifully, with extraordinary hints of Native American mysticism and government conspiracies. In another's hands, such flights of fancy would verge on the ridiculous, but Kellerman manages to keep her fantastic plots well under control. For those with a strong stomach and an imaginative streak, Moon Music is a captivating thriller. --K.A. Crouch
In leaving behind LAPD detective Peter Decker and his wife, Rina Lazarus (last seen in Serpent's Tooth, 1997), for this Las Vegas mystery, Kellerman unfortunately also abandoned the warmth and depth of characterization that mark her series' books. Featuring Las Vegas homicide cop, Romulus Poe, in the murder investigation of two prostitutes, this tale also trades in the series' foundation in religion (Orthodox Judaism) for sensational pseudo-scientific and/or supernatural suggestions of lycanthropy. The first prostitute whose badly mutilated corpse is found in the desert was the onetime mistress of Poe's fellow cop Steve Jenkins. That complication exacerbates the two cops' already strained relationship: Poe and Jenkins's wife, Alison, who were high-school lovers, still harbor feelings of attachment. Alison's mental and emotional instability figure large in the narrative, which also involves the above-ground testing of atomic bombs at the Nevada Test Site when Poe and his twin brother, Remus, were infants. (The boys' growth was severely stunted; Remus, the first to be treated with growth hormone, became a seven-foot giant; Rom, treated less aggressively, achieved a normal height). Alison, a teenager when her mother died under suspicious circumstances, may also have been affected by radiation fallout. More deaths and mutilations lead to a climactic action scene at the Test Site, but it and the sketchy resolution are no more convincing than the dialogue, the characterization or the plot in this neon-lit disappointment from a writer capable of much better work.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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