The Forgotten

When you’re the wife of a cop, all it takes is a single phone call from the police to send your heart reeling. But after learning that her husband and children are safe, Rina Lazarus’s fright turns to fury. Someone has viciously vandalized the storefront temple where Rina and her family worship. And though years of living with religious intolerance should have steeled her, Rina quickly summons her husband, Detective Lieutenant Peter Decker, to find and arrest the culprit.
Not surprisingly, it’s just a boy who claims responsibility for the crime. But something about the confession of Ernesto Golding, the 17-year-old scion of wealthy parents, and the easy sentencing of community service and counseling that he receives, leaves Decker troubled. How could a single young man wreak such total destruction on his own? And if he wasn’t alone, then who acted with him or encouraged him to commit such a senseless crime?
It isn’t long before Decker has more to worry about than another troubled teen spiraling out of control. Only weeks after entering counseling, Ernesto and his therapists are brutally murdered. And their deaths are only the beginning.
Now what seemed like and open-and-shut case has turned far deadlier that anyone could have imagined. And as the body count mounts, Peter Decker and Rina Lazarus find themselves thrust into the world of the nouveau riche, where hate and greed lie just beneath the surface of a glittering facade, twisted minds admire winning above all else, and a child’s academic success is the ultimate status symbol.
Because in a world as perverted as this, the desire to be the best has driven otherwise good parents to do very bad things, leaving them and their families at the mercy of a killer who has his own reasons for needing to succeed. Few can resist the lure of his attractively disguised promise. None can hide from his psychopathic reach. And this time, not even Decker’s own stepson will emerge unscarred from the search for a killer.