Rating: 
Summary: Dreams for Aspiring Authors
Review: This book gives inspiration to all author wanna-be's. Try just a bit & you'll create something better than this meager tale. This novel is downright boring. Hardly what one would term "a page turner." It lacks for excitement, suspense, enjoyment, wonder, chills and just about every reason readers gravitate toward fiction. It was my first Faye Kellerman novel & very well might be my last. However, I should keep in mind the works of Dean Koontz. Sometimes a work of art--Dark Rivers of the Heart. Sometimes a work of an over imaginative saddistic middle school student--so pathetically terrible, not worthy of mention by title. That said, Kellerman should be given the benefit of the doubt; I vow to try 1 more.
Cynthia "Cindy" Decker is our leading lady. A police officer who is following in the footsteps of her, mildy camoflauged macho-macho man, police officer father. Cindy meets up with an irresistible male RN who works in a pediatric ward, no less. He's quite the smorgasboard--Jewish, Ethiopian, Black, Russian, We Are The World, nicknamed "Kobie." It doesn't get much better; as in---it's rather lame. Kobie has no life outside of the sterile walls. But...then he meets Cindy and by darned, she's also Jewish! Therein lies their only commonality. They're not natured alike; they don't think alike. No chemistry between them. Quite frankly, there is very little character development in those two. They're basically androgynous. After many chapters, we find that Cindy sees a therapist for some unknown reason & bless her heart, suggests that Kobie should see one...for some unknown reason...or maybe it's his self-professed "dark moods." Which don't seem to be more than a slight shade of gray. Not that we are ever privvy to said moods. Cindy Decker's big find/big case is an infant who is miraculously found in a dumpster. Even more miraculous is that the infant survives. And miracle of all miracles, the mother is tracked due to shared Down's Syndrome. In Los Angeles! Amazing. The true miracle here is how this book made it to a publisher. My cat seems to have more extraordinary street dreams.
Rating: 
Summary: Street Dreams
Review: This book was very bad. Nothing like prior books in the series.
She needs to stick with Decker.
Rating: 
Summary: A female Jewish Cop in LAPD, hard hard hard!
Review: This is a detective story of a new style. In a way an inside story of the LAPD. Cynthia Decker is a cop on the beat in Hollywood. We follow her step by step in a period of her professional life, her transition year from officer to detective. This period is centered on one particular case : the story of Sarah Sanders and her discarded baby. This leads to exploring the world of handicaped people in LA, their problems, their reactions to life and their ways of thinking and behaving. But this also leads to a network or gang of people who are taking advantage of retarded women with a gang rape and a shadowy character who seduces them, uses them and then discards them. Violence is of course part of the picture : a man is beaten up, a woman is hit and run to death, Cynthia Decker is the victim of an attemped murder, etc. But the interest of the book goes a lot farther. It explores the institution known as the LAPD, its inside rivalries, careerism and ambitions, its legal limitations that prevent efficiency, and the necessity at times to go beyond these limits to get the information and the lead an investigation needs, and even the difficulty for women to be really equal in this institution that is definitely male-dominated. Even further it explores the problem of racism inside the institution and of the insritution towards society at large : racial prejudice is an everyday reality and it requires a lot of work to get rid of it or at least to neutralize it. But even further, Cynthia Decker being Jewish, it goes into exploring the Jewish community she lives in, with openings to the old antisemitism of Germany in the 30s, to antisemitism in America today, to the Jewish commmunity spirit both religious and social or cultural, etc. This exploration of Jewish culture is extremely interesting and it is the basis of the motivations of several characters in the book as for their involvement in police work and hospital work. The book brings the case to an end which is in a way a satisfying ending giving answers to all the questions asked in the novel. It has a few flaws that limit the effectiveness of the reasoning. For instance, the fact that the killer is an Iraqi disguising himself as a Mexican is a little bit easy. Sex offenders come from all walks of life and all social strata. It would have been a lot more effective if this character had been a plain American citizen, because most offenders in this field are plain American people, in general plain citizens in any country who are characterized most of the time as simple, lackluster and just nice neighbors. In the same way the anti-arab or anti-Palestinian stand of some characters, though perfectly true among some Jews is provided to us without any distanciation and without what is essential among Jews : all Jews are not thinking along this line and quite many of them remember their past and refuse to reproduce this past against the Palestinians, even in Israel itself. It is also too easy to reduce, the way the book does, the national struggle of Palestinians to terrorism. But apart from these flaws, the book is interesting because it goes beyond the plain criminal details into the psyche and consciousness of the people at stake, particularly the cops. Cops are definitely not simple-minded people : they do have a culture, an ethical stand and doubts about their involvement in society and the way they have to work to find criminals in a society that is definitely opaque and obscure, a characteristic that enables criminals to hide very easily.Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
Rating:
Summary: Tried but failed.....
Review: This is the first Kellerman book I have read. I knew I was jumping into a character series, so I knew that I would be at a lost sometimes about previous events. But nothing about these characters inspired to want to go back and investigate these events. The "main" story - about a baby found in a dumpster had alot of promise but it fell short. The mother was soon discovered, by Cindy talking to a high school class of pregrant girls. Now these girls are street hard, tatooed, young and alot of attitude so how do they notice a girl that may or may not be pregrant that sits on a bench. The whole story just falls into place - too many people that would never talk just seem to want to tell Cindy everything. The sub-plots are as pat in that they provide no challenge.
Sorry, to say that I will not backtrack to see why Cindy and her dad are so emotionally distressed nor do I really care what happens in their future.
Rating:
Summary: Disappointing read
Review: This was a really difficult book to finish. Nothing about it interested me. To be brutally honest I don't understand how it is classified as a crime/mystery as it seems more appropriate as a cheap romance novel. If this book is anything to go by, I won't bother trying any of her other books.
Rating:
Summary: Father and Daughter join in this edgy mystery
Review: 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
Rating:
Summary: Jonathan is no doubt the better Kellerman author.
Review: Tried hard to finish this book. No compelling plot, boring dialogue, bogged down with religion, predictable characters and elementary writing style. I have always considered Jonathan the better writer. Have read all of his books with no complaints.
Rating:
Summary: Street Dreams
Review: What happened to Faye Kellerman? I have been hooked on her books. This one is clearly not up to par! It's choppy, all over the place, the story line doesn't flow.... Other than the fact that the same characters were used, it almost seems like the book was written by someone else. Very disappointing!
Rating:
Summary: You'd Think I'd Learn
Review: With each Faye Kellerman novel I think, well, I enjoyed a couple -- maybe the next one will be better. No such luck. Her characters have two settings: passionate and angry. The players seethe and boil over at the slightest provocation; that is, when they're not having sex. At this point it has grown tedious. Cindy's bi-racial relationship devolves into cliche: "the South shall rise again" (p.443)....what year is it again? Honey, have you ever been to Atlanta?
This, however, pales next to the anvil-like subtlety of Kellerman's Jewish subtext. Don't misunderstand, this flavor in her writing has produced some of the most enjoyable and informative pieces of text previously, but the whole Israeli = good, Palestinian/Arabic = terrorist thug bit is black and white thinking on a pathological level.
Another reviewer suggested that this would inspire novelist wannabes to go ahead and write. I say: have at it; you probably couldn't do worse.
Rating:
Summary: Fun read starring Decker's cop daughter Cindy !
Review: With more than a dozen books in the popular Rina Lazarus/Peter Decker series, Faye Kellerman's new books are normally anxiously awaited by her fans. We've come to enjoy the clever mysteries solved by this conservative Jewish couple, with fairly detailed expositions of the Jewish religion part of the nominal price of admission. In one earlier book, "Stalker", Decker's daughter by his first marriage, Cindy, now an LAPD officer, was the central character in an compelling story of danger and crime solving. In "Street Dreams", so titled from the recurring nightmares she has of her earlier experience, Cindy once again plays front and center, the opening premise about a still-alive baby she finds in a dumpster. Through some brilliant and persistent sleuthing, above the call of duty for a "mere" officer not yet on the official ('gold shield') Detective staff, Cindy finds not only the natural mother but pursues strong leads to the probable natural father. Along the way, and with just a little help from her father Peter, Cindy helps track down a hit and run killer while getting leads on some dangerous gang members. All in all, the mystery had an entertaining plot and a nicely drawn conclusion. Unlike most of Kellerman's stories which feature sometimes almost overwhelming descriptions of Jewish orthodox practices, in this novel she provides a love interest for Cindy in the form of a male nurse named Yaakov "Koby" Kutiel, an African who turns out to be an Ethiopian Jew. When things get hot between the two, some interesting scenes take place when Cindy decides to take Koby home for Sabbath dinner. The family reactions to the mixed race couple varies from shock by daddy Peter to immediate acceptance by mama Rina, that latter based on the simple binary discriminator that Koby is a Jew. A great deal of interesting dialogue from these characters as well as some of the detectives spoke to the issue of mixed race and faiths, and added a provocative element to the main story line without "taking sides". To us, this is one of the best Kellerman offerings in the recent past. Her usual excellent story telling, combined with social issues of concern to all, with just passing indulgence in Jewish practices, make "Dreams" a novel that should enjoy broad reader delight. Read it!
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