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Moon Music: A Novel
 
 
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Moon Music: A Novel [Hardcover]

Faye Kellerman (Author)
2.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (187 customer reviews)


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Book Description

July 22, 1998
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.



Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com 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 Publishers Weekly

In leaving behind LAPD detective Peter Decker and his wife, Rina Lazarus (last seen in Serpent's Tooth, 1997), for this Las Vegas mystery, Kellerman unfortunately also abandoned the warmth and depth of characterization that mark her series' books. Featuring Las Vegas homicide cop, Romulus Poe, in the murder investigation of two prostitutes, this tale also trades in the series' foundation in religion (Orthodox Judaism) for sensational pseudo-scientific and/or supernatural suggestions of lycanthropy. The first prostitute whose badly mutilated corpse is found in the desert was the onetime mistress of Poe's fellow cop Steve Jenkins. That complication exacerbates the two cops' already strained relationship: Poe and Jenkins's wife, Alison, who were high-school lovers, still harbor feelings of attachment. Alison's mental and emotional instability figure large in the narrative, which also involves the above-ground testing of atomic bombs at the Nevada Test Site when Poe and his twin brother, Remus, were infants. (The boys' growth was severely stunted; Remus, the first to be treated with growth hormone, became a seven-foot giant; Rom, treated less aggressively, achieved a normal height). Alison, a teenager when her mother died under suspicious circumstances, may also have been affected by radiation fallout. More deaths and mutilations lead to a climactic action scene at the Test Site, but it and the sketchy resolution are no more convincing than the dialogue, the characterization or the plot in this neon-lit disappointment from a writer capable of much better work.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

  • Hardcover: 400 pages
  • Publisher: William Morrow; 1st edition (July 22, 1998)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0688143695
  • ISBN-13: 978-0688143695
  • Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.8 x 1.3 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
  • Average Customer Review: 2.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (187 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,675,487 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Faye Kellerman is the author of twenty-six novels, including nineteen New York Times bestselling mysteries that feature the husband-and-wife team of Peter Decker and Rina Lazarus. She has also penned two best selling short novels with her husband, New York Times bestselling author Jonathan Kellerman, and recently has teamed up with her daughter, Aliza, to co-write a teen novel, entitled PRISM. She lives in Los Angeles, California, and Santa Fe, New Mexico.

 

Customer Reviews

187 Reviews
5 star:
 (15)
4 star:
 (26)
3 star:
 (20)
2 star:
 (33)
1 star:
 (93)
 
 
 
 
 
Average Customer Review
2.1 out of 5 stars (187 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars Oh My God!, March 25, 2000
I love both Faye and Jonathon Kellerman. Their books have always kept me enthralled, and I am usually dissapointed when I get to the end of them - not because I was dissatisfied, but because the book was so good I didn't want it to end! Well, Faye took care of that for me this time! What a GREAT dissapointment this book was. I had it figured out early on, but I thought it was a workable idea - so I continued to fight my way through the book. I shouldn't have wasted my time. It was horrible. She would bring in new scenarios or characters in such a way that you would think you must have missed something earlier on. She made it sound like it was the second or third time she had brought them up, and I'd flip through the pages I had already read to see where they were mentioned - but they were never there. I was so dissapointed in this book. Not up to her Decker/Lazarus books by a long shot! Don't waste your money on this one! Don't even use your Library card for it!
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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Kellerman gets grittier, November 22, 1999
By A Customer
As a fan of Faye Kellerman's previous works, I was excited to "find" this paperback at the store. Even more suprised that she had tried her hand at something other than the Peter/Rina novels. I think it's unfair to compare this book to the Decker mysteries; this is a book that should be critiqued on its own merit. I found it to be a darker, grittier departure for Kellerman. But as with any of her books, I was hard pressed to put it down. I think it's necessary for an artist to expand their horizons, or their characters run the chance of becoming stale. While her ending is a bit out there, I found it to be good escapist fun.
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars A trunk book?, March 30, 2000
I'm presently in the middle of Moon Music. It is very disappointing. In fact, my guess is that it's a "trunk book," pulled out because Kellerman missed a deadline about a year and a half ago. It appears to have been written by a much less skilled, much younger writer. It's overblown (and appears fundamentally unedited) at nearly 500 pages. The time frames seem to shift. The viewpoint character repeatedly shift, and not in any The Sound and the Fury sort of way, either -- sometimes thoughts show up on the page that you can't seem to attribute to anyone in particular because the viewpoint character has shifted two or three times on a single page.

It's always been interesting to me that, once a writer starts successfully publishing, anything s/he has written will get published, good, bad or indifferent. And, of course, people will buy it based on the strength of past work by the author. I've called this "bestsellerdom" in the past, and mourned such victims as James Patterson, who used to write good mysteries. I suppose once you can start making tens of thousands of dollars by writing one-line paragraphs, by not self-editing, by bringing out old, inferior work, by not sweating over each word, the temptation to do so is pretty fierce. Sad to see good writers give in to it.

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Inside This Book (learn more)
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First Sentence:
IT WAS a land-hostile and unforgiving. Read the first page
Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
naked city
Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Brittany Newel, Las Vegas, Linda Hennick, Big Ray, Sarah Yarlborough, Marine Martin, Parker Lewiston, Honey Kramer, Jane Doe, Sergeant Poe, Frenchman Flat, Gerald Hennick, Nevada Test Site, Ali Abdul Williams, Uncle Sam, Yucca Flat, Fat Patty, Lady Slipper, Aunt Shirley, Detective Deluca, Gretchen Wiler, Janet Doward, Nali Abousayed, Big Top, Lamar Larue
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