Double Homicide

Rating:
Summary: Flaccid and uninspired!
Review: Kellerman usually delivers a tightly wound mystery thriller with a psychological edge. This one
barely makes it off the ground. The story was adequate as were the characters, but lacked punch.
The story by his wife is a little better but spoiled by a sudden and somewhat jarring ending.

Rating:
Summary: Not what I expected
Review: 2 interesting novellas but not the usual character development I expect from the Kellermans...I have read ALL of his and hers & generally love them.The Santa Fe one was the most interesting: 2 good characters, but the ending was, I think, weak. The Boston was VERY boring to a non-sports-fan...all that description of a basketball game...tedious!! But I liked Dorothy..maybe they can each expand on these and further develop the characters. But, I wish they would go back to what they do SO well and bring back the Deckers and Alex!!!.

Rating:
Summary: One Plus One Sometimes equals one half.
Review: Double Homicide really consists of two short stories. The book construction is clever but neither story reaches the level that we are used to. I have read more of Jonathon than Faye so I can not tell if it is her influence that predominates. STill Life which is set in Santa Fe was more interesting. Steven Katz is an interesting character. The story unwinds in the normal Jonathon matter but it lacks the character development that I enjoy in his books. The ending is interesting. Unfortunately the story is too short to really care about any of the characters.
The other In the Land of the Giants is an old story. Although Dorothy is interesting again we did not have the time to watch her really develop.
I imagine the Kellerman's had some fun writing this and it was pleasant entertaining. Really the effort proves that two is not always better than one.

Rating:
Summary: Very weak effort by both
Review: I am a big fan of Jonathan Kellerman's work and have read them all. This was a real disappointment. The plot of both short stories was as thin as the book. Nearing the end of each I thought to myself -- why do I care what happens? Not a good sign for this type of book. Glad I got it from the library and did not part with real money for this effort.

Rating:
Summary: Surprise endings
Review: If you're in a hurry, just read the last chapter in each of these novellas, because all the other chapters waste your time wondering how the suspects could have committed the crimes, then, Lo and Behold! "Out of the woodwork" comes the guilty party who wasn't even considered up until the last 10-15 pages.

Rating:
Summary: one half plus one half does not equal one
Review: In that I am not sure why the Kellermans wrote this particular book, it may be, in their eyes, a successful change of pace. For me, it was somewhat disappointing and not reflective of the psychological and literary gifts found in their other writings. The stories had a lot of potential but lacked the focus and punch of a short story and the character development of a novel. Change can be good ~ it will be interesting to see if this is evolutionary or simply a mutation.

Rating:
Summary: Double Your Pleasure, Double Your Fun
Review: Sante Fe: Detectives Darrel Two Moons and Steve katz have their dinner interrupted when they are called out to a murder scene. Someone has killed high society art gallery owner Larry Olafson. Olafson had been well known among the East Coast literati and had two Galleries in New York. Back East he'd made a couple supposedly honest mistakes about the provenances of some paintings, though that's not why he had claimed he moved to the Southwest. No, it was a change of pace he was after, well now his pace had sure been changed, but by who? It seems he's been involved with some causes that have caused him to make a few enemies and the detectives find the painting vault in the dead man's gallery open, with his inventory log missing. It looks like maybe a thief might have done the deed, but maybe there is something more going on here.

Boston: Dorothy Benton is a single mother with two sons, one is in college and a plays on his school's winning basketball team, the other is in high school and having a difficult time of it. Dorothy is also a police detective. She does her best, juggling career and motherhood, trying to be good at both and part of being a good mother is going to all of her sons basketball games with her partner Micky McCain. However after one game there is a shootout downtown and several of the team players are involved, including the star forward, who has been killed. During the course of the investigation the medical examiner finds something strange and now the investigation isn't very cut and dried at all.

This is a two cover book, Boston Novel on one side, but if you flip it over you get the Santa Story. Two books for the price of one. Two, good books by the way. Two fast-past mysterie thrillers that will keep you guessing. Yes, this is a good deal, Two, two, two books in one.

Rating:
Summary: A Bit Thin for Hardcover
Review: This was another Christmas present and as such, I enjoyed reading the two novellas done by the Kellermans. The book is easily read in a day. I started with the homicide set in Santa Fe and was finding it interesting until the end arrived. And that is about the way it happened. Not much explanation - some questions left hanging. I liked the relationship of the two police officers and their characters were well drawn. It was almost as though this was intended to be a full blown novel, but the author(s) ran out of steam and decided to pull the plug in the way that they did.

The Boston homicide story was clearly the better of the two, yet I thought that it also could have been drawn into a larger story if the authors had chosen to do so.

So, if you are looking for a couple of plesant little stories about homicide and have a plane ride to take or some time to curl up by the fire, I would suggest you wait for the paperback. It should be right along.

Rating:
Summary: The Kellermans can do much better than this
Review: 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.


Rating:
Summary: Double Disappointment
Review: Why? Because these two novellas feel like the clearing out of old drawers. Because Faye Kellerman is a top-notch writer and I see little evidence of her here; there is virtually no character development in these stories; relationships (between mother/cop and her two sons in 'Boston') get addressed but are left without resolution. Because each novel reads like a skeleton for one. Because the end of 'Santa Fe', with its bizarre, unexpected, twisted ending, reminds me of the two times I read other Jonathan Kellerman novels -- and stopped reading him when I found myself too-suddenly each time, predictably looking at some character's crazy actions -- without the insanity being rendered artistically or understandably. (See Jeffrey Deaver's mysteries for high-level renderings of motives, and how previous life traumas, both for victim and perpetrator, inform their actions.) -- Because I waited with anticipation for many months before this book came out and the hopes fit not at all with the experience of reading it.

Jonathan Kellerman uses a strange device in his novels. Familiarly, in 'Santa Fe', a character we don't even meet until the last few pages is found inexplicably dissociated and sitting and painting a picture while her murder victim (who we also didn't know before) lies nearby. (There are more bizarre details but I don't want to give it away in case someone actually wants to put down money for this book after reading the reviews -- also, I couldn't possibly tell you what it was all about since nothing about the scene was clear.) We weren't privy to her all along, we don't care about her or her victim; this device seems merely added to shock. All this is just as in the Jonathan Kellerman novels I read before -- I was left with a feeling of needing to brush my teeth afterwards -- just 'Yuck'. Indeed the ending in this one was so un-related to the rather interesting characters of the cops and their lives which went before I had to wonder a few times after putting it down if I had indeed finished it. Neither 'book' kept me reading, on the contrary, I had to push myself to finish each of them).

The dialogue in each novel is fine; the characters, two cops in each, all come across in the beginning as potentially interesting and even likable. But the uncompelling nature of the stories is the same in 'Santa Fe' as in 'Boston', which city is, in addition, described in hackneyed terms: as a college town whose mayor wants the crime solved quickly or the town's reputation with parents (who send their kids to various schools there-- you may have heard of some of them) will suffer, and so will the city, economically. Boston's reputation? I doubt it. It is patronizing and simplistic, throughout.

In 'Santa Fe', J. Kellerman's (I presume it is he; it is like his style) ending suddenly throws gore in your face. There is not enough artistic attention to meaning, or to background for psychic motives; not enough understanding of traumatic effects so that readers are left traumatized, not edified or having been somewhere they can either learn from, grown because of or been to a place they feel they ever wanted to go. J. Kellerman's device of suddenly thrusting a twisted, insane scene upon us, alone, without ameliorating description, reminds me, in its effects, of an old boyfriend (a psychiatrist; go figure) who, after spending a quiet evening in San Francisco suddenly took me speeding dangerously down a steep SF street -- I was terrified, it was no fun at all, and it ruined the evening and dented my trust in him.

Thinking about how these books are each structured, I am reminded of a game we girls used to play as young teenagers, in which you write a sentence on a piece of paper, fold it over, pass it in a circle to the next person who doesn't look at it except for the last line and each writes another part of the story. Neither of these two books have authors who wish to take responsibility for them. The endings don't satisfyingly fit with the beginnings. Is this Double novella book such an experiment?

I love all of Kaye Kellermsan's books, all of them. Except this one. Why did she publish this? It is indeed a mystery.