Moon Music: A Novel - Hardcover

Kellerman, Faye

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0688143695 ISBN 13: 9780688143695

Publisher: William Morrow, 1998

Synopsis

“Fascinating....Fast-paced and dynamic.”
 —Dallas Morning News

“Kellerman is taking a big risk here, and I think she pulls it off in fine style.”
—Washington Post

With Moon Music, New York Times bestseller Faye Kellerman leaves Los Angeles and heads to stranger territories: “Sin City” Las Vegas, Nevada. Taking a brief hiatus from her mystery series featuring LAPD Homicide Detective Peter Decker and his Orthodox Jewish wife, Rina Lazarus, Kellerman delivers a masterful stand-alone crime novel that crackles with suspense and tantalizes with a touch of the paranormal. The horribly savaged body of a once-beautiful Vegas showgirl is discovered in the desert not far from the world-famous Strip, plunging Detective Sergeant Romulus Poe into the heart of a bizarre, full moon-soaked mystery that could cost him everything he holds dear in life, including his sanity.

About this title

Review:

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

From the Back Cover:

Just outside of the city's neon Strip, in the bleak wastelands of Nevada's desert, Las Vegas Metro police discover the mauled corpse of a young and beautiful showgirl. Even in a city known for its excesses -- from Arab sheiks to casino billionaires -- this crime is particularly shocking because of the animalistic destruction of the body. Called to the crime scene is Detective Sergeant Romulus Poe -- a thirty-five-year-old Vegas native and a seasoned, fifteen-year police veteran. A loner with a love of justice, Poe immerses himself in the horrific case.

The corpse is badly mutilated. Certain organs are gone and the exposure to the harsh desert elements has made forensics very difficult. Poe is particularly struck by its dreaded similarities to a horrendous slaying done by an anonymous monster dubbed "the Bogeyman." Immediately, Poe forms an investigatory team consisting of the handsome detective Stephen Jensen, his colleague but no friend, Detective Patricia Deluca, a homicide newcomer, and forensic pathologist Rukmani Kalil, who is also Poe's part-time, unorthodox girlfriend.

From the start, the team is mired in a web of intrigue. And the urgency of resolution becomes frenzied when another young nighttime desert dump is found a month later.

From Native American mysticism and medieval folk legends to untold twentieth century scientific secrets, Poe must sift through Vegas's sordid past and dark underbelly to solve a series of gruesome murders -- and to save a beautiful woman he had once loved -- before all of them are caught in a deadly dance of Moon Music.

About this edition

• Publisher: William Morrow
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0688143695
• ISBN 13: 9780688143695
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 400