The Ritual Bath

May 1, 1986
Baptist big cop Peter Decker is reduced to jelly by tiny Jewish jewel Rina Lazarus, mistress of a ritual bathhouse in Los Angeles, on whose grounds a rape, which Decker is investigating, has just taken place. When she's not scrubbing out the mikvah, Rina, widowed mother of two sons, teaches math at the yeshiva, where several of those suspected of the rape and later of a particularly hideous murder either teach or study the Torah. Despite detective Decker's instant bedazzlement, however, Rina's orthodox charms and pious invocations to the deity are pretty subfusc; the entire cast is so jejune that the reader doesn't give a rap whodunit. Thus, the principle of the murder mystery genre is violated, the more seriously by the author's ambiguity as to whether she is writing a romance, a homily on the practices and virtues of observant Judaism or a detective novel.

January 28, 2008
Like the series it inspired, Kellerman's award-winning 1986 debut novel combines police procedure, via hard-boiled LAPD detective Peter Decker, with Judaic rites and rituals courtesy of its heroine Rina Lazarus, an ultra-Orthodox widowed mother of two. Decker and Lazarus are brought together by the brutal rape of a young bride-to-be at the mikvah (a bathhouse used in the purification ritual) that Rina manages in the Hollywood hills. Mitchell Greenberg nicely vocalizes the story from Decker's point of view, with the detective struggling to stick to his sleuthing in spite of his developing feelings for Rina. The novel continually rings true, from explaining various Orthodox beliefs and customs to Decker and his crew's no-nonsense unmasking of the villain. Greenberg moves in and out of the novel's elements smoothly and efficiently. He paces the police work with just the right sense of urgency and frustration; handles the romantic sequences with the proper emotion and without a hint of sentimentality; and breezes through the many Jewish-centric passages with the confidence and clarity of a yeshiva graduate. An Avon paperback.