The Burnt House - Faye Kellerman

At 8:15 in the morning, a small commuter plane carrying forty-seven passengers crashes into an apartment building in Granada Hills, California. Shock waves ripple through Los Angeles, as L.A.P.D. Lieutenant Peter Decker works overtime to calm rampant fears of a 9/11-type terror attack. But a grisly mystery lives inside the plane's charred and twisted wreckage: the unidentified bodies of four extra travelers. And there is no sign of an airline employee who was supposedly on the catastrophic flight.

Decker and his wife, Rina, have personal reasons for being profoundly shaken by the tragedy, since the "accident" occurred frighteningly close to their daughter Hannah's school. Luckily, their child and her schoolmates escaped unscathed. But the fate of the unaccounted-for flight attendant—twenty-eight-year-old Roseanne Dresden—remains a question mark more than a month after the horrific event, when the young woman's irate stepfather calls, insisting that she was never onboard the doomed plane. Instead, he claims, she was most likely murdered by her abusive, unfaithful husband. But why, then, was Roseanne's name included on the passenger list?

Under intense pressure from the department to come up with answers, Decker launches an investigation that carries him down a path of tragic history, dangerous secrets, and deadly lies—and leads him to the corpse of a three-decades-missing murder victim. And as the jagged pieces slowly fall into place, a frightening picture begins to form: a mind-searing portrait of unimaginable evil that will challenge Decker's and Rina's own beliefs about guilt and innocence and justice.

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When I discover a new author, I will read the cover of the first book and if I like I won't read the cover of future books. I find the jacket gives away too much story line and in the end takes away from the experience. I will sometimes read the book then read the cover. I did that with this novel and I'm glad I read the book without the direction given from the cover information. The cover touted this novel as intense and indicates that Decker will be pressured from many angles to crack this case. I didn't find this to be the way of the novel at all. Decker was under pressure from one source it seemed, the father of one of the murder victims. Rina was pretty much a non-factor which was neither here nor there.

All in all the book was good, but if I were using the jacket description as my guide I would have been disappointed.