Kellerman’s sleuth series ends in bizarre, brutal fashion

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This article was published 25/02/2023 (1317 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The final murder mystery for Peter Decker and Rina Lazarus is… well, actually, it’s completely disgusting.

Their 27th adventure (published in hardcover last year and arriving in paperback in March) sees the couple holding their breath and crossing their fingers as Decker sleuths one last murder — a body found in upstate New York, and several other people missing — before they ride off into the sunrise to a house they’re renovating in Israel.

But The Hunt isn’t about them, it’s about two recurring characters we’ve seen in the past — Dr. Teresa (Terry) McLaughlin and Chris Donatti, the former an ER doctor, the latter a monster.

McLaughlin is living in India with her second husband, a surgeon who’s run up millions of dollars in gambling debts. She grabs their two kids and makes a run for Los Angeles, only to have the thugs to whom her husband owes money beat her nearly to death and kidnap their little son.

She turns to the only one who has the money and the soullessness of a predator to get her son back — Donatti, her first husband.

Donatti is a former mob hitman who’s gone legit, running a legal brothel and casino empire in Nevada. They have an adult son, Gabriel, a renowned classical musician, whom Decker and Lazarus had once fostered and treated as their own son.

McLaughlin makes a deal with the devil — to get her son back, she’ll divorce her husband, re-marry Donatti and submit herself to whatever he wishes.

Donatti owns people. He owned Terry and will own her again. He beat her, he raped her, and she was his property; even after Terry got away, Donatti stalked her in India, had henchmen watch her constantly, took a shot at her husband.

McLaughlin is the first-person enslaved narrator for most of the book, locked away in Donatti’s world, guarded by his men, as she recovers from her attack. And as she recovers…

Donatti can instantly go into a fury, unleashing what he shrugs off as uncontrollable and insatiable sexual appetites with the right to feed upon his property, forcing unspeakably violent acts on her, which Kellerman describes in appalling detail over, and over, and over, and over and over again. For nearly 500 pages.

At one point the author euphemistically calls his attacks “sodomizing” but most of the time, it’s graphic, excruciating in its abundant and prolonged detail, beyond horrifying.

Donatti controls every second of McLaughlin’s life: he decides if and when she can leave his suite, he doles out access to her daughter, he decides what she’ll wear, what she’ll eat and drink, he does her makeup and hair. He rapes her again and again, for nearly 500 pages.

Is Kellerman using the wrap-up to a popular series to educate her readers about what life is like for abused women? About how difficult it is for women to break free of their abusers? The subplot about Decker’s murder investigation also involves a suspect who’s an abusive, obsessed man.

Kellerman tells us going into the story that it’s the last book she’ll write about Decker and Lazarus, but doesn’t elaborate. No hint of what she’ll do next, though Decker’s daughter Cindy pops up a few times in The Hunt, having just transferred into homicide in Philadelphia.

Kellerman is a scion of a writing family that includes husband Jonathan Kellerman — who writes the terrific murder mystery series featuring psychologist Dr. Alex Delaware and gay L.A. cop Milo Sturgis — and their son Peter Kellerman and daughter Aliza Kellerman.

Faye Kellerman’s previous books have left readers unprepared for The Hunt. Reading it is an ordeal of depravity and fear and pain. And yet at times Kellerman seems to be asking us to be at least a bit sympathetic to Donatti, himself raped and beaten as a child and raised by gangsters.

It’s not the way most authors end a popular series. Brace yourselves.

Retired Free Press reporter Nick Martin is still reeling emotionally from reading The Hunt.