Kellerman's Finesse Is Not Forgotten

The Forgotten by Faye Kellerman

After Stalker, I was afraid that Faye Kellerman had reached her peak and was on a steady downhill slide. It marked the second book by her that had left me horribly disappointed. Had The Forgotten been a third strike, Faye Kellerman would have struck out on my reading list.

The Forgotten, to my relief, is a base hit in which Faye Kellerman resumes her ability to tell a tightly plotted, suspenseful story with rich, interesting characters. The Forgotten returns the focus to Rina and Peter Decker and a series of crimes that deeply affect them both.

For those unfamiliar with the series, Peter Decker is a Los Angeles police detective. He and his wife, Rina, are Orthodox Jews. Their family consists of Peter's grown daughter, Rina's two sons, and Rina and Peter's daughter.

The book opens with the discovery of a hate crime. The shul Rina and Peter attend has been desecrated with Nazi propaganda and hateful graffiti. Peter's investigations lead him to collaring a student at a wealthy and influential private high school. The plot thickens when this student and his therapist are found murdered at a rehabilitation camp.

As is common with Faye Kellerman's stories, the book grows increasingly dark and the conspiracies wind about themselves until they crescendo at the book's climax with Peter and Rina shining light on all the issues, even those that remain unresolved.

The Forgotten marks a return to the family life of the Deckers. Kellerman creates relationships between the various members that are very real in their tensions, affections, anxiety, and loyalty. We watch as the family struggles to help each other even while there are layers of distrust and uncertainty. Jacob, Rina's teenage son and Peter's stepson, is truly a teenager with all the hormones and moodiness common to that age. He's fleshed out more in this novel than he has in any of the others.

In her portrayal of teenagers, Faye Kellerman makes no attempt to sugar-coat adolescence. She engages lurid language and descriptions to bring you into their often-confused and angry world. Kellerman also rejects the sympathetic view that teenagers are simply misguided or hormone-bound. She portrays characters who make deliberate choices. Some of them struggle to recover from bad choices and others revel and repeat them. Kellerman is able to paint some highly despicable characters, characters that you hope your own children are never touched by-however naïve that desire might be.

The Forgotten also spotlights the enormous pressure that some parents put on their children to score well on college standardized entrance exams. It is hard not to be outraged at the push toward Ivy League schools and the lengths to which the parents in the novel go. It would be easy to dismiss Kellerman's portrayal as exaggerated fictions if it weren't for items in our newspapers every day talking about camps to prepare high school students for exams or advertisements of expensive special tutoring. Kellerman merely fictionalizes the effect that sort of high pressure has on a few individuals. I, for one, found the fictionalization to be highly believable even in its misfortune.

Kellerman dips once again into the well of anti-Semitic conspiracies in this novel. I can hardly complain about it, though, given how well she does it. Kellerman is exquisite in her ability to strain our credibility with outlandish discoveries while still leaving us with the sinking feeling that what we are reading could be too horribly true. Through the character of Rina and her investigations, we are able to learn more about the Holocaust and the things that people did. We learn why it might still matter to find out about the actions of even the smallest of heroes or the least of villains.

The Forgotten is a book that is often heart-rending. Kellerman mixes a stew of warmth, tension, suspense, and love in a way that only she can. She balances obscenity with sacredness and evilness with redemption. After the most touching of moments, she gives us tidbits that make us laugh out loud, refreshing us for a time from the nastiness and raw sewage that she's exposed us to. In all, it was a book well worth reading and leaves me optimistic about Faye Kellerman's future offerings.

--B. Redman