Rina Lazarus

Rina Lazarus is a fictional character in a series of mystery novels by Faye Kellerman.

Rina, an Orthodox Jew, is the daughter of Holocaust survivors from Hungary. She married a yeshiva scholar when she was 17, lived in Israel with him for a time and had two sons. During the First Lebanon War she helped care for wounded Israeli soldiers, gaining a medical skill useful in her later American life. At that time she resided in the Israeli settlement of Kiryat Arba in the West Bank, and - as she clearly expresses in A Stone Kiss - retained a positive attitude towards the Israeli settlers. Her husband died of a brain tumour and she went to a US college to finish her degree in mathematics. She is living and teaching at a yeshiva school when she meets her second husband, Los Angeles police sergeant (later lieutenant) Peter Decker, in The Ritual Bath. Decker, though raised a Baptist by his adoptive parents in Florida, discovered as an adult that his birth parents were Jewish, which makes him officially Jewish as well. After meeting Rina during his investigation of a rape at the yeshiva, he is compelled to explore the religion for himself and eventually to become a religiously observant Orthodox Jew.[1]

Religion is a central part of Rina's identity. Though loving Peter, she would never have married him had he not been ready to become a Jew - not only by the accident of birth, but also by a conscious decision to become a practising Orthodox Jew with all that involves. Rina strictly keeps the dress code and behaviour appropriate to a "frum" Orthodox Jewish woman. Still, there are some exceptions.

In Prayers For the Dead it is revealed that, at one moment of her life, Rina had been deeply involved with Bram Sparks, a Roman Catholic priest, as deeply committed to Catholic Christianity as Rina was to Orthodox Judaism. Though probably not physically consummated (that point is left a bit ambiguous), the two of them deeply loved each other - even though such a love was clearly contradictory to the behaviour dictated by both their religions. Moreover, she retains some of her feelings for Bram even when already married to Peter - which makes Peter very jealous.

All of the books that follow in the series are rooted in Jewish themes. Major characters in the series include Rina's two sons, Jacob and Samuel Lazarus; Cindy Decker, Peter's daughter from his first marriage; Rina and Peter's daughter Hannah Decker; and Peter's partner Marge Dunn. Decker's daughter from his first marriage, Cindy Decker, a teenager in the earliest books, eventually follows her father into the police force and is the main character of two of the later books, Stalker and Street Dreams.