Is This Goodbye?

Apparently, the answer is yes.  The good news is, she saved the best for last.

Do you have characters you've followed through the years?  Men and women you met in early adulthood, who aged along with you, and who are now retiring?  Characters whose lives touched yours in some places and were pure fiction in others but who always seemed like old friends when a new book came out.

And now there will be no more.  This is the final Peter Decker/Rina Lazarus novel, according to the dedication that hit me between the eyes in a most surprising fashion.  

Faye Kellerman has been writing the series since 1986.  She and I were young mothers at the same time and now, in 2023, 29 books later, our kids are all settled.  Her inner thoughts quite often mirror mine.  I get their marital verbal shorthand.  I'd like to be their friend, and not only for her cooking.  

So when The Hunt appeared on the Your Lucky Day shelves in the library I took it for my own.  It's just shy of 500 pages.  It took me two, don't bother me I'm reading, days.  They were lovely days.  

Most of the book focuses on other characters, and I thought they might be the start of a new series.  I was reluctant to get involved; they were going to supplant some of favorite fictional friends.  But their relationship drew me in, searching for understanding, considering options and obsession and psychopathy and the brothel business in Nevada.

Yes, there were unusual situations.  Some of them left me wondering about the research.  But I was always rooting for them, even in the darkest of moments.

At the end, I was left doubly bereft.  I'm going to miss every single one of them.

*****

If you haven't read them, start at the beginning.  This is one series that really does need to be built from scratch.