The Lost Boys, Faye Kellerman

One of the problems an author has when he or she is writing a longstanding series character is that a person can write actively a lot longer than they can do other professional work. Especially when that series centers on a police detective, originally made about the age of the author and aging along with him or her. Faye Kellerman has been coming closer and closer to the edge of that problem with former Los Angeles homicide detective Lt. Peter Decker for several years now. She moved Decker and his wife Rina Lazarus, introduced in 1986's The Ritual Bath, to upstate New York for a less hectic life and nearness to kids and grandchildren. Decker took a job as a detective in a mid-size university town that still provided the necessary annual puzzling murder required for series sleuths. But now as both Kellerman and Decker near 70, another milestone looms and the 2021 Decker/Lazarus novel, The Lost Boys, may be setting the stage for Peter's finale.

Three parallel storylines run through Lost Boys, with only one of them resolved and the scene set for a later novel to offer answers in the other two. A mentally challenged man has gone missing from a day trip and Peter and his partner, Tyler McAdams, are part of the search of the heavily wooded area near the diner where he was last seen. When the two detectives make a trip to the center where the man lived, they uncover reasons to suspect that he may not have wandered off but been a part of a scheme to leave the center's care. If so there's not really a case, since the center was merely a place to live and not his legal guardian. But in searching for clues that could cinch that scenario, evidence of another crime is uncovered and the matter can't be closed as quickly as that.

During the search, a set of remains are uncovered that are linked to the 10-year-old disappearance of three students from a local college. Some indications of foul play mean that Peter and Tyler will re-investigate the case, which happened before either of them joined the department. The interviews with parents reopen many of the old wounds and while they may help clear up what the three young men were like they don't explain what happened to them.

A strength of the Decker/Lazarus series has always been Peter's groundedness in his home and family life. Kellerman gives him a slightly off-kilter but functional blended family full of children, stepchildren and now growing grandchildren. As the children also aged in real time, Kellerman introduced a foster son, Gabe Whitman, whom the Deckers helped raise because his birth parents were not adequate to the task. Now Gabe's irresponsible mother has come to him for help when her current husband's gambling debts imperil her and her two younger children. Gabe tries to help her on his own with assistance from Peter and Rina, but he may be forced to call his father -- a former hitman who now owns a legal brothel in Nevada -- when things grow rougher.

The three plots run concurrently and because only one of them resolves it seems clear that Kellerman intends some kind of continuation in a subsequent book. None of them are developed well enough to carry a whole narrative on their own and the usual puzzling and scenario discussion that Peter and other police officers use to try to figure out what happened according to the evidence at hand is not particularly inspired. The actual solution isn't all that well-hidden among the other ideas the detectives kick around and its eventual unveiling feels rushed and clunky.

If Kellerman is preparing for Peter and Rina's twilight years, either by continuing to chronicle them in whatever retirement setting they create or by ending the series as they begin that phase of life, The Lost Boys seems like a good table-setting story to do that. The only problem is that it's a relatively weak entry in the series on its own merits.