Sacred and Profane

In the rocky hills above Los Angeles, two gruesomely charred skeletons have been tossed carelessly under a bush. Rina Lazarus' two young sons discover them while on a camping trip with L.A. Detective Peter Decker. So begins the second in a series of extraordinary mysteries featuring Detective Decker and Rina Lazarus, the Orthodox Jewish widow whose beauty and empathy beguiled Decker and turned all his beliefs' upside down in the highly praised The Ritual Bath. The dual murders obsess decker, especially after a forensic dentist tells him that the victims were teenage girls. As a father, Decker's heart breaks. As a cop, his determination hardens. Who were these girls? What brought them to such a brutal death? Is the answer hidden within the genteelly respectable home of one of the victims? Behind those open faces, those guileless eyes of the grieving family? Or does it lie inside the airless, rat-infested crack dens of Hollywood Boulevard? Everywhere Decker looks he finds drugs and degredation. He must rely on a brutalized but feisty prostitute and a network of street people-whores and pimps, junkies and dealers-to lead him on. His only respite is Rina and the wise elderly rabbi who counsels Decker in the mysteries of Judaism. Once he was just a cop, a man who lived a life of black and white, them against us. Now he's guided by the uncomfortable and exotic rules of an ancient religion. So while Decker is embarked on a shocking, shattering outward journey into the very worst of modern life, he is traveling on a spiritual journey as well. Faye Kellerman's characters are reverberantly, movingly human. Sacred and Profane is a novel of compelling suspense, action, and psychological understanding. Copyright 1987 by Faye Kellerman. Published by Avon Books.