The Mercedes Coffin [Mass Market Paperback]

In bestseller Kellerman's uneven 17th novel to feature LAPD Lt. Peter Decker and wife Rina Lazarus (after 2007's The Burnt House), Decker must solve a 15-year-old cold case—the murder of saintly Bennett Little, a high school history teacher whose bound body the police found, with three shots in the back of his head, in the trunk of Little's Mercedes. When unscrupulous music producer Primo Ekerling turns up dead in the trunk of his Mercedes, Genoa Greeves, a wealthy computer mogul with fond memories of Little as a teacher, offers the LAPD a seven-figure charitable donation to reopen the case. Early in the reinvestigation, Decker is brought up short when one of the original cops on the case eats his gun just before a scheduled appointment with the lieutenant. Finding a link between Little and Eckerling won't prove easy. Fans may enjoy the interplay among Decker, Rina and their children, but newcomers would be advised to start with an earlier entry in this popular crime series. (Aug.)
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Billionaire Genoa Greeves believes the LAPD should finally solve the fifteen-year-old execution-style murder of her favorite teacher, Bennett Little&#8212;especially now that Hollywood music producer Primo Ekerling has been slain in an eerily similar manner: shot and stuffed into the trunk of his Mercedes-Benz.
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Lieutenant Peter Decker resents having to commit valuable manpower to a cold case simply because a rich woman says, “Jump!” But when a primary investigator in the Little case, now retired, suspiciously commits suicide hours after he and Decker talk, the detective realizes something evil's connecting the dots in two murders separated by a decade and a half. Wife Rina Lazarus offers a cool, rational outlook, as always, despite her growing concern for her husband's welfare&#8212;as past and present collide with a vengeance, catapulting Decker ever closer to the edge of an infinite dark abyss.
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Faye Kellerman is the author of twenty-seven novels, including twenty New York Times bestselling mysteries that feature the husband-and-wife team of Peter Decker and Rina Lazarus. She has also penned two bestselling short novels with her husband, New York Times bestselling author Jonathan Kellerman, and recently teamed up with her daughter Aliza to cowrite a young adult novel, Prism—the story of four teens in an alternate universe. She lives with her husband in Los Angeles, California, and Santa Fe, New Mexico.