DOUBLE HOMICIDE
JOHNATHAN & FAYE KELLERMAN
Warner Books
$23.95 (256 pages)
Pub. date: October 5, 2004
ISBN: 0-446-53296-7

Johnathan and Faye Kellerman have put their best-selling minds together and come up with DOUBLE HOMICIDE, a new series of short crime books.

The first installment contains two novellas, “In the Land of Giants” and “Still Life,” each co-written by the husband and wife team.

“In the Land of Giants” is set in a frigid Boston, where detectives Dorothy Breton and Michael McCain have a real mystery on their hands. College basketball star Julius Van Beest is gunned down in a downtown nightclub, and all fingers point to a rival hoopster. A slam-dunk case, right? Wrong, says medical examiner John Change.

In “Still Life,” the weaker of the two stories, Santa Fe detectives Darrel Two Moons and Steve Katz spend the holiday season investigating the bludgeoning murder of a wealthy—and despised—art gallery owner.

The tales are straight-up police procedurals ruined by inexpert storytelling.

The plotting is handled ably, but the Kellermans get clumsy when drawing their characters. “Still Life” lapses into a coma on several occasions from long-winded character histories. At one point the plot is interrupted for thirty pages of character sketches. It’s only a 133 page story, for goodness sake.

There’s another big no-no. “In the Land of Giants” opens dramatically with Detective Breton discovering a gun in her son’s backpack. There’s an old theater adage that says, “If there’s gun over the mantel in Act I, then it must go off in Act II.” Neither the gun nor the son ever figures in the story. So why open with this plot device? Does it have something to do with characterization? Theme? Plot? Seems more like a cheap tease.

DOUBLE HOMICIDE isn’t either of the novelists’ best work. Two Kellermans certainly aren’t better than one.