This is the twelfth in the series star­ring Lieu­tenant Peter Deck­er and his love­ly, wise wife, Rina Lazarus. A com­muter plane crash­es onto an apart­ment build­ing in a built up area in L.A. After the bod­ies are recov­ered there is no sign of an air­line employ­ee who was said to have been on the doomed flight. The inves­ti­ga­tion into the miss­ing woman is made more com­pli­cat­ed by a dif­fer­ent body found buried beneath the rub­ble, which reopens an old mys­tery about anoth­er long miss­ing woman. Peter Deck­er relent­less­ly over­works his staff of famil­iar detec­tives from the pre­vi­ous nov­els. We learn about the jus­tice sys­tem as dif­fer­ent the­o­ries about the crimes are method­i­cal­ly investigated. 

In this quick read­ing series, the detec­tive sto­ry is inter­spersed with scenes from Peter and Rina’s Ortho­dox Jew­ish home life. We learn about Jew­ish tra­di­tions as we fol­low the couple’s inter­ac­tions with their chil­dren and Rina’s par­ents dur­ing Shab­bat and hol­i­days. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, in this book we don’t hear about Rina’s sons at all, though we’re treat­ed to a few scenes of Han­nah, the couple’s teen daugh­ter and Cindy, Peter’s mar­ried daugh­ter. Rina patient­ly advis­es cyn­i­cal Peter with her faith in Jew­ish wisdom. 

I would pre­fer few­er descrip­tions of everyone’s cloth­ing and more of the Deck­ers’ per­son­al lives. Though this install­ment was less excit­ing than usu­al, any fan of Rina and Peter will enjoy the descrip­tions of cul­ture in San­ta Fe and Los Ange­les, cities obvi­ous­ly close to the author’s heart.