Ich habe das Buch in der Original-Ausgabe gelesen "Jupiter's Bones" (die deutschen Titel sind aber auch so etwas von sinnbefreit)
Ignore the text on the back cover.
Emil Euler Ganz used to be a renowned astrophysicist. After disappearing for ten years, he returned as Father Jupiter, founder of a religious cult called the Order of the Rings of God, teaching science and promoting time travel. Now he is dead. LAPD Lieutenant Peter Decker is rather sent along due to the deceased’s former fame. Everything looks like an ordinary suicide, but then, the behavior of the members of “the Order“ makes Peter’s stomach churn. So, he has his team investigate further.
This is book number 11 from the series but might be read stand-alone – except for rather the first of the series, “The Ritual Bath“: some private issues relate back to what had happend then, concerning Peter’s family. That first book was when he got to know Rina as a witness of a crime scene, a young widow and mother of two young boys. She now is his wife, mother of his stepsons and their young daughter together, he also has a grown-up daughter from his previous marriage, Cindy.
The story is a straight police procedural related to the investigations around a cult site, and as always, author Faye Kellerman throws in a lot of background information on the religious background of the Deckers, which are orthodox Jews. All of the last books had much less of that topic than the first ones, this time it is on jewish kittels, kindness to animals, sexual regulations. I found the book a good and solid read, one of the good ones from the series, though not one of the best. The discussion around “what might have happened, is…“ were entertaining and seemed realistic enough an approach. There even was some final showdown with a whole lot of action.
Dislike: my edition is a 1999 Headline Feature (i.e. the publisher) paperback – the print goes very far towards the spine so that you really have to bend the book’s spine to read it. I HATE that. More gutter margin, please!
Solid 4 ½ stars
