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. She married a yeshiva scholar when she was 17, lived in Israel with him for a time and had two sons before her husband died of a brain tumor. She went to college to finish her degree in mathematics and is living and teaching at a yeshiva school when she meets her second husband, Los Angeles police lieutenant Peter Decker, in The Ritual Bath. Decker, though raised 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 t