Customer Reviews

Street Dreams

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(17)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(14)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

in the way Kellerman had let this series meander in her last two outings "The Forgotten" and "Stone Kiss". Unlike many of the other readers I want to applaud this latest effort, picking up on Cindy Decker as the main character, and continuing her story from "Stalker".

It is true that if you haven't read the series, this book won't work for you. But like many patient readers of "series" mystery and thrillers, I get a little tired of the time and effort spent recapping the series for new readers. At some point, (and this is the 16th book in series), an author needs to cater to the fans that have been loyal enough to follow the series.....so, the action picks up without a lot of background noise on either Cindy or parents Peter/Rina -- a welcome relief.

Cindy's police work is supplemented this time by a much more realistic love story than her affair with a detective in "Stalker". Koby, the man she meets and falls in love with, is perhaps drawn too physically, but the sexual energy and attraction between them shines through, much like the early books portrayed the link between Peter and Rina. For once, Peter and Rina take a trip/vacation where there is no need for police work, and no family to "save" (thank goodness!)...their backdrop of searching for Rina's family past in Europe is a nice, humanistic setting for the primary story.

Cindy's got an interesting, realistic crime to solve, and there is some danger, along with a lot of help and advice from her father and Koby. The book moves rapidly, with the love and family stories seamlessly meshing with the police work.

If Kellerman can follow this book up with a winner, starring the new couple, she might be the first contemporary serial writer to successfully move her stories from one generation to another; an interesting accomplishment.

More!

In this latest installment of the Decker family series, Kellerman commits a grave sin as far as good mystery writers go: there is little, if any, suspense, and she sacrifices the mystery by focusing on two plots that go absolutely nowhere.
The focus in this novel is on Peter's daughter, Cindy, who continues to be a non-interesting, hardly likeable character. She continues to resent teamwork, and now she finds herself madly in love with an Ethiopian Jew. A disarmingly handsome nurse who helps her out when she finds the abandoned baby. Again, Kellerman lets her religious fervor dominate. What's odd about this particular romance is that obviously from Koby's own words, his relationship with Cindy is primarily physical. He wants to have sex with her all the time; he also has dark moods that are never truly explained or resolved. Combining the racial and religious problems fails to enliven this meandering romance.
Then we have this other plot where Rina is investigating the murder of her grandmother in 1930's Poland. She goes all out to discover the truth, but when the novel ends, we have no further understanding of what really happened.
And perhaps the biggest disappointment is that even after the child abandonment, the hit and run, etc., the killers are characters who have had little time in the novel. So who can really care?
I have read all of the series now and still maintain that "love/hate" relationship with Kellerman's books. She might be better off just writing family tales of the usual marital and romantic woes, than trying to slide a mystery in.
Not the best of her series in the long run.

I couldn't put this book down!Although I agree with the booklist review that the mystery was almost secondary, as a long-time Kellerman fan I loved meeting the new character of Koby and I was as interested in that as I was the mystery. I thought it was great to learn more about Cindy too and now I want to go back and re-read Stalker.

The promo ads for Faye Kellerman's newest mystery tout her talent, proclaiming, "She has a way with murder". Generally, I would agree with that assessment, but Kellerman's last offering is somewhat under par for a writer who does have the chops to craft a tight story.

In Street Dreams, another of the Pete/Rina Decker series, Kellerman brings back Pete Decker's daughter by his first marriage, Cindy, a two-year veteran of the LAPD, with designs on a detective shield. On regular patrol, Cindy discovers a newborn baby in a dumpster behind an LA restaurant. Determined to find the mother, Cindy is warned by her father not to step on any of the detectives' toes while pursuing her own investigation.

In the course of her sleuthing, Cindy does find the mother, a developmentally disabled young woman who tells of a harrowing gang rape in a local park where she has met the father for secret trysts. The father is also developmentally disabled. There may be even more to the story, as Cindy learns that other vulnerable young woman may be in danger. At the hospital where the baby is taken, Cindy meets a male nurse, an Ethiopian Jew. They are immediately attracted to each other and pursue a relationship.

Per usual, Kellerman, uses her captive audience to impart more information about Rina's rich religious heritage as a devout Jew. In the first few Pete/Rina Decker novels, this approach served to flesh out Rina's character, adding depth to her role as socially conscious mother and wife. This time, however, under the guise of solving the mystery of Rina's grandmother's murder in pre-Nazi Germany, she requests her husband's assistance in reading documents she has discovered. In the context of Street Dreams, this subplot serves as an unnecessary distraction.

There are numerous mentions of earlier trauma suffered by Cindy and Det. Decker(in another Pete/Rina Decker book), but the author never explains the ordeal involved or why both father and daughter are unable to shake the pyschological effects. Since their relationship is a strong component of the story, this aspect is somewhat frustrating for a reader unfamiliar with the Decker series.

Most disturbing to this reader, however, is Kellerman's handling of the romance between Cindy and her new boyfriend, although he is portrayed as handsome, sexy, well built, intelligent...practically perfect. The only obstacle is Cindy's father, who is affronted at his daughter's reluctance to inform him ahead of time that her boyfriend is black. I found Kellerman's portrayal exploitative and stereotypical, a surface treatment of the subtleties of race relations, complete with racist comments by other officers (another obvious stereotype) regarding size and performance, pandering to common curiosity and ignorance. Perhaps the author should put as much effort into researching this cultural aspect of her story as she does on Rina's religious beliefs. I can deal with a mediocre mystery, but it is disappointing when an author uses sex and race instead of good writing.

This author might have better used the energy expended on superficial distractions by constructing a believable plot for this series. Although Kellerman can't see the forest for the trees in Street Dreams, she does have the talent to write an effective mystery and is certainly capable of giving her fans the quality they appreciate and deserve. Luan Gaines/2003.

This was the first Faye Kellerman I've ever read, and I certainly got the sensation that I was stepping into a book mid-series, but nowhere in the plot did I feel that I'd missed too much to understand the story or the characters.

The plot in this book has a simple enough set-up: an LAPD cop, Cindy Decker, finds a baby abandoned in a dumpster. When she grows far more attached than professional, she enlists the aid of her detective father, Peter Decker, to try to figure out where the baby came from, and who the mother was. When the answer is unsettling, Cindy delves deeper. Each new wrinkle in the case seems meaner and darker than before, and soon Cindy is a target, something she is all too recently familiar with - for Cindy is a rape survivor.

Kellerman kept these characters very plausible, emotionally speaking, and I quite enjoyed the first-person narrative of Cindy Decker. Where I lost a bit of steam was the often abrupt slip into third person that occurred whenever the spotlight was on her father, Peter, or other players in the story. Their emotional baggage with each other (far more loaded than most fathers and daughters) is well written, and the tension really aids in jacking up the pace of the story.

The two sub-plots are also wisely written and interesting: First, Peter's wife, and orthodox Jew, is looking into the past of her mother (and her grandmother's murder), in the dark history of Hitler's Germany, to very intruiging results. And second, Cindy has a developing relationship with (also Jewish) Ethiopian black Koby, which shows some pretty edgy takes on bias and racism, as well as some quite steamy passages of passion between the two.

All in all, very satisfying in and of itself (and even to someone who has not read Kellerman before), but I must admit, my appetite is whetted for Kellerman now.

'Nathan

I've almost completed reading the entire Peter Decker/Rina Lazarus series and for the most part, I've been pleased. I haven't read them in order, since I check them out of the public library, so I have to check out whatever's available. I liked 'Street Dreams' very much except for a couple of things.

The first has to do with Cindy's love interest, Koby. The guy gushed over Cindy as if he were reading from either Shakespeare or Elizabeth Barrett Browning. I mean, come on, do any of us actually know any men who actually talk like that?

The second is a bit more of a problem that has to do with continuity. I write fan fiction, using the same characters and try to keep my ages consistent. Ms. Kellerman has a problem doing this. I just started reading 'Sanctuary' and it's mentioned in this book that Hannah is now nine months old and the boys are 11 and 14, respectively. In street dreams, Hannah is now 12, but the boys are 18 and 20. This isn't possible. In 'Grievous Sin,' it's mentioned that Cindy is 18 at the time of her half-sister's birth. In 'Street Dreams,' it's mentioned several times that she's 28. She should be 30, with the boys being 23 and 26. I also thought that Sammy and Jacob were two years apart and not three. Little things like this don't have anything to really do with the story, but I feel that the author should at least be consistent with her characters. Other than that, I enjoyed this book, especially the chemistry between Cindy and her father as she got to really see how he operates as a detective. However, I do hope that in the future, Ms. Kellerman sticks with Peter and Rina.

I have been disappointed with the last few books in the Decker series so I bought this one with some hesitation. I needn't have worried - Kellerman is back with a book that reminds me of the early books in the Peter & Rina Decker series. Kellerman focuses on Cindy Decker, Det. Decker's daughter in this mystery. Like the best of the Rita and Peter Decker books, this one has a love story interwoven with the mystery/police story that deals with cultural differences: Cindy meets and falls in love with an Ethiopian Jew. You don't have to have read any of the other Decker series books to enjoy this one, but if you have you will rejoice that all the familiar elements are here. The central mystery is well-paced and the solution isn't obvious unlike many mystery books. Peter and Rina play a supporting role but Cindy and her new romance are the stars. Welcome back Faye Kellerman!

Kellerman's favorite couple, Pete Decker and Rina Lazarus, have a long history. Street Dreams assumes readers are familiar with that history, which is a good thing for readers who have followed the series from the beginning - but not so good for readers picking this book without some background. It works as a stand-alone, but just barely.
But true fans and followers of the Decker/Lazarus union will relish this solid whodunit as it takes the pair's relationship to new heights.
Cindy, Pete's adult daughter by a 1st marriage, plays a major role as a rookie cop in Street Dreams. She investigates the case of a developmentally disabled teenager who abandoned her baby, says she was raped, and might have been an unwitting witness to a murder. Good stuff. Read it.

I have enjoyed all of Faye Kellerman's other books and bought this the day it came out. I was very disappointed; there was little or no suspense or mystery. It is certainly not a page turner! The relationship between Cindy and Koby was neither interesting or believable. I hope the next book focuses on the older generation!

I've read this series for years. One reason is that like Rina and Peter, I am a religious Jew. Also like Rina, I am a child of survivors. I didn't mind the lack of mystery for the sake of developing the story of Cindy and Koby; I thought that was a strength of the novel. However, I have gotten a bit sick of "saint" Rina, Peter's explosive temper, and now situational religiosity: Koby says he keeps kosher but eats out vegetarian (it doesn't work that way); has nonmarital sex (also doesn't work that way); mostly keeps the Sabbath unless there's a cool party Koby's invited to (oh really)? I can understand (my family lives in LA) living in Silver Lake and not in Los Feliz (the price differential is breath-taking), but Kellerman should know better- she has Rina explaining to Peter in an earlier book what's wrong with eating vegetarian out, etc.

The secondary story of Rina and Peter was just too upsetting. Not just the material, but the premise. Peter needed R&R after the big shoot-out in New York, not let's play Nazi-hunter in Germany. And picking Munich for a vacation spot? Seriously? I found that most incredible of all. When they live a 40 minute plane ride from Lake Tahoe, one of the most beautiful places on earth?
Last peeve: When will Kellerman learn to count? The ages of most of the main characters are all wrong!