Below is the complete list of Faye Kellerman books in order. For each series, the chronological reading order is the same as the order of publication.
Publication Order of Peter Decker and Rina Lazarus Books
Publication Order of Standalone Books
Publication Order of Short Story Collections Books
Publication Order of Mysterious Profiles Books
About Faye Kellerman
Faye Kellerman is an American mystery novelist best known for the Peter Decker and Rina Lazarus series, a long-running blend of police procedural, family drama, religious identity, and psychological suspense. Her work occupies a distinctive place in crime fiction because it combines the structure of homicide investigation with a serious interest in Orthodox Jewish life, marriage, parenting, community, and the moral pressures that surround both faith and violence. She writes mysteries with bodies, evidence, suspects, and police work, but her strongest books are also about belonging: who is inside a community, who is excluded, and what people hide to protect the lives they have built.
Born in St. Louis and raised in California, Kellerman studied mathematics at UCLA and later earned a dental degree. That unusual background—analytic training, scientific discipline, and close attention to human behavior—fits naturally with crime fiction. She published her debut novel, The Ritual Bath, in 1986, introducing LAPD detective Peter Decker and Rina Lazarus, a young Orthodox Jewish widow living in a yeshiva community. The novel established the central balance of the series: a violent crime pulls Decker into a religious world he does not fully understand, while his relationship with Rina opens emotional, cultural, and spiritual questions that continue far beyond the first case.
Peter Decker and Rina Lazarus became one of crime fiction’s most durable partnerships because their relationship is not simply a romantic subplot attached to police work. It changes the direction of both lives. Decker’s discovery of Jewish ancestry, his growing connection to observant practice, and his marriage to Rina give the series a long domestic and religious arc unusual in mainstream detective fiction. Rina is not merely the detective’s wife; she is intelligent, principled, observant, and often crucial to the way the books understand family, faith, and moral obligation.
The Decker/Lazarus novels began in Los Angeles but gradually widened into a family saga as much as a mystery sequence. The books follow Decker’s work in law enforcement, Rina’s role within family and community, their children and extended relationships, and later changes in setting and stage of life. Individual entries often involve murder, kidnapping, cults, academic secrets, medical or scientific settings, old crimes, and social tensions, but the continuity comes from watching the central couple age, adapt, and carry their commitments through decades of danger.
Kellerman has also written outside her signature series. The Quality of Mercy is a historical novel involving Elizabethan England and William Shakespeare. Moon Music moves into darker standalone crime territory, while Straight into Darkness is set in 1920s Munich, showing her interest in historical atmosphere and moral disorder beyond contemporary policing. She has written short fiction as well, including work collected in The Garden of Eden and Other Criminal Delights, and collaborated with family members in a literary household that includes novelist Jonathan Kellerman and writer Jesse Kellerman.
Her fiction is sometimes described as traditional mystery, but that understates its range. Kellerman’s best work depends on the tension between public investigation and private conviction. Police procedure asks what happened and who did it; religious and family life ask what responsibility remains after the legal question is answered. That combination gives her bibliography its identity. Across the Decker and Lazarus books and her standalones, Faye Kellerman writes about crime not as an interruption of ordinary life, but as a force that exposes the hidden structures—faith, loyalty, fear, love, and secrecy—that were already there.