An exhaustive search is launched by Detective Pete Decker of the Greenbury, NY, PD when Bertram Lanz, a man with cognitive disabilities, goes missing on a field trip from his care facility. While no sign of Lanz is found, the search uncovers a buried body discovered to be that of a male college student who disappeared on a camping trip 10 years earlier (along with two other students, also vanished). That cold case comes to the forefront as Decker and colleague Tyler McAdams seek to bring closure to three sets of parents. As Decker mulls over the two cases with his wife, Rina Lazarus, and with McAdams, a problem closer to home arises, when Decker's foster son, concert pianist Gabe Whitman, gets a plea for help from the biological mother he tries to avoid. This twenty-sixth entry in the Decker-Lazarus series will be embraced by fans for its emphasis on the lead characters and the relationship between them, as the couple's future takes a turn, and a cliff-hanger ending guarantees anticipation for their next outing.

In bestseller Kellerman's so-so 26th novel featuring married couple Peter Decker and Rina Lazarus (after 2018's Walking Shadows), Decker, a former LAPD detective now with the police in the "sleepy little college town" of Greenbury, N.Y., has two cases to occupy him. First, 35-year-old Bertram Lanz, who's cognitively disabled, has gone missing from a field trip arranged by his residential facility, and after extensive searches don't locate him, Decker fears that Lanz could have been abducted. Second, the searchers locate human skeletal remains that may belong to one of three college students who vanished a decade earlier. Lazarus has little to do apart from prepare food and give advice to her family. Drama among the extended family pads the detecting, and banal prose ("Four decades of detective work had taught Decker a thing or two. One of the delights of Missing Persons cases was that they often had happy endings. But sometimes not") is another minus. This one's for longtime fans only. (Jan.)

In Fellowes's The Mitford Trial, lady's maid Louisa Cannon is asked by a shadowy stranger to spy on Diana Mitford and her sister Unity, with someone ending up dead in the water when Louisa later accompanies the Mitfords on a cruise (75,000-copy first printing).