OKAY YES I AM A NITPICKER BUT JESUS.
"I was a double major at U. New Mexico."
THAT IS A LINE SPOKEN BY A SUPPOSED NM NATIVE. AT FIRST I TOTALLY COULD NOT PARSE WTF HE MEANT AND THOUGHT KELLERMAN WAS MAKING UP A UNIVERSITY. It's called UNM! Jesus Christ. Yeah yeah it is a TINY fucking detail but it did not just throw me out of the story, I nearly threw the book against the WALL. Writers are supposed to be careful with language! Words are how you get inside someone else's head -- as Stephen King said IIRC, the closest thing we have to telepathy. To knowing how other people think and feel and see. If we don't take care how the fuck can we pass on anything? If the details aren't right how can any of us know anything, any fact or placename or thing about another living soul? It all becomes gibberish.
Also I don't think UNM has anything like a Criminal Justice "major." There's the Department of Criminal Justice at New Mexico State University, which I think is what he means. NOT THAT ANYONE CARES. BECAUSE IT'S NEW MEXICO. But I bet he thought that wouldn't work, because it's an Aggie school.
....Yes, I know it comes off as weird or obsesso when I get so incensed over details. But it's like the time in a writing workshop (IN New Mexico!) (yes, picture me in a grad school writing workshop. Or not, if your tolerance for horror is low) when someone wrote about Iowa City as a small conservative farming town. It was a passing detail in the story -- not even a place where one of the characters was from -- but still, I fumed, because the compact between reader and writer is essentially one of trust: you read my book, you let me put my words in your head, and I will take you somewhere -- it may be somewhere exciting, somewhere dull, somewhere absolutely wonderful, but I am your guide and I show you the way. But of course it's not as one-way as that; the reader joins in, to some extent, picturing people and places and details. The closest analogue I know to it is music -- the scores's the printed page, the reader is the musician, and the book itself, the living experience of reading, is like the music, made only when the notes (words) are being read, only lasting as long as each reading but there to return to, every time. And if there's something jarring, no matter how small, the effect is -- as the musicians say -- a clinker. Too many wrong notes, sour chords, and I'm not going to read your book. If you get wrong details that I do know, no matter how small, how can I trust you telling me stuff I don't know anything about? How can I want to be one of your characters or look through their eyes? Sure, all viewpoints are subjective and everything is partial and distorted in the end, it's a fallen fucken world, we're all Kantians. But that doesn't excuse not getting it right. Orwell's Winston Smith says, The best books are those which tell us what we know already -- reaffirming our knowledge, a firm place to rest on. The worst books are the ones we read and realize have no affinity to reality whatsoever.
So, UNM. Sheesh.
ETA Also, the main suspect is a (SPOILER). Great, now this is turning into L&O:SVU.