Double Homicide

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View books by Faye Kellerman, Jonathon Kellerman.

Over hyped, major disappointment from major writers! - Rated
I am a great fan of Jonathan Kellerman, but this instalment is a great disappointment. This is more like a debut thriller than a piece of work by well established international bestsellers!

Both Santa Fe and Boston are too predictable, without the usual amount of twists and turn in the story.

It is a readable novel; but perhaps the best example of not to judge a book by its cover! One do tend to expect a lot more than this when it says TWO CITIES TWO MURDERS TWO MASTERS on the cover!

Double Jeopardy - Rated
I am a fan of Faye Hellerman's mysteries. She and her husband, Jonathan, another author, have collaborated on a double-sided novel. Two murder mysteries on separate sides of the country. The cites happen to be my two favorite cities, Boston and Santa Fe.

It is difficult to tell if Faye Kellerman wrote the Boston novel. But, it sounds like her. Dorothy Breton is a Boston detective and has two son's one of which is a ballplayer on the Boston Ferris College basketball team. This team is something special, and the specialness is a player named Julius. Dorothy invites her partner, Michael McCain to the big game. Boston Ferris wins, and the team goes out to celebrate. Dorothy is called a few hours later by her son to let her know something horrible has happened- Julius has been murdered at a night club. Dorothy and Michael begin the job of learning the who, what and why. They get involved in the family business of the Boston Ferris team, and the opposing team and being the good detectives they are they find the murderer in a surprise ending-that is more of a shock than surprise.

Darrell Two Moons and Steve Katz, two Santa Fe policemen are eating at their favorite restaurant when the call comes in that a very famous art dealer man has been murdered. This starts the story of a man no one liked; least of all his two sons and ex-wife. As the policemen dig deeper they find that almost no one liked this man, and that some of his friends were more disliked than he was. But who would hate him so much as to kill him? The two policeman in the midst of the investigation, discover almsot more about themselves than they do of this man Lawrence Olafson. They find the murderer, of course, and it is not much a surprise- but then again maybe it is.

This double-sided novel is a good PR ploy. The Boston story was better written and more interesting. The Santa Fe story had some interesting character studies. Neither story involved much of the city beyond some basic information. I like to be able to relate to the city in a novel and walk along the same streets as the characters. All in all a pretty good novel, very short and sweet. Neither novel is one of the best, nor one I hope this couple repeats. I like Faye Kellerman's characters and storylines- let's keep this family's murder mysteries separate, prisrob

Change-Up Character-Exploring Novellas from the Kellermans - Rated
Before thinking about buying or reading this book, please realize three things:

1. This book contains none of the Kellermans' usual characters.

2. There are two novellas involved rather than a novel.

3. The stories emphasize incident-revealing aspects of the characters of the police, the victims and the perpetrators rather than the "mystery," the "procedures," or the "backdrop."

So if you want more of what you've loved before from the Kellermans, look elsewhere.

However, if you love reading about interesting new characters and thought-provoking themes expressed in novellas, you will have a hard time finding better work.

I thought that Santa Fe was the better of the two stories. The characters were more original and written with more love. The Boston characters were too hard-edged and cold to be fully appealing. For those who insist on having a mystery to their police procedurals, Boston will be the more appealing story.

Although I clearly saw a blending of the two styles in the stories, Boston felt more like Ms. Kellerman and Santa Fe felt more like Dr. Kellerman.

I'm glad that the Kellermans fought off what was probably a panicky reaction from their publisher when they proposed this work. Although many of their fans will hate it, I had fun.

For me, the best part of the two stories came in the obvious morales about how we lead our lives. The victims contributed to their own deaths.

Santa Fe's victim is a wealthy art dealer who treats others like objects to be manipulated. Boston's victim is a young college basketball star in the full flush of the glory following his greatest game. Pride was the sin for each. Like Icarus, each flew too close to the sun . . . and crashed to the earth in a fatal fall.

Enjoy!

Disappointed - Rated
I was delighted when I found that two of my favourite authors had teamed up to write a crime novel in two settings and couldn't wait to get my hands on it. However I must say that the two separate stories struck me as too routine and very average in composiotion and content. No surprises, no arcane linking of the cases in two cities, no deep insights. I had expected better of either author, particularly considering the tantatlising promise of their joint effort.

The Kellermans can do much better than this - Rated
When I saw that a book that had stories by two of my favorite authors was coming out, I could not wait to get my hands on it and see if the synergy I assumed would be present in this work was actually there. To my disappointment the quality of the stories is not even at the same level of any of their individual work, let alone better. One of the stories, Boston, is clearly better than the other one, Santa Fe; but in my opinion it is not as good as either the Alex Delaware or the Rina Lazarus / Peter Decker novels.

In Santa Fe, Darrel Two Moons and Steve Katz work nights in the Special Investigations unit. One freezing night they get a call that breaks the usual tedious pattern of domestic disturbances and abusive husbands. In this case it is a homicide, which took place in an art gallery. It looks like your usual investigation, but things are a little more complicated than that, since one of the officers had an altercation with the victim a little while ago. The authors try to make the story interesting by digging up the past of the two policemen. I believe this is an effort to make their characters more real to the readers, but while they succeed with this in their novels, they failed miserably in this case. The story is bland and does not have a lot of substance.

In Boston, Dorothy is a single-mother policewoman who has two kids and is having trouble with her youngest one. One day when she was cleaning his room she found a gun in his backpack. But soon after she thinks she cannot handle any more, she gets the news about her oldest son being at the stage of a shooting in a club. The violence started after a confrontation between two basketball teams, and Dorothy's son plays in one of them. The victim is the start in her son's team, so Dorothy has to deal a lot of stuff. She has the help of Michael McCain, a policeman who has lost his charm and is not as appealing to women as he once was, is living in a dump and does not have much to look forward to. The pace of this story makes it a lot more interesting, so it is much better than Santa Fe. Even though I would not rate it as five stars, I would say it is a decent effort.

In conclusion, one of the stories is good enough to read, but I would not recommend the other one to anybody. This is a disappointing work by a talented couple of authors who should be able to provide their readers with much better stories than these.