From Publishers Weekly

The second collaboration by bestsellers Jonathan and Faye Kellerman (after Double Homicide) offers two thin novellas that dedicated fans will most appreciate. In the first, My Sister's Keeper, Faye Kellerman's LAPD detective Peter Decker makes an extended cameo role in an inquiry into the murder of an activist lesbian California state representative, Davida Grayson. Grayson, who was the focus of threats from politicians and members of the radical right opposed to her support for stem-cell research, is found shot to death in her Berkeley office; an uninspired pair of local police find that the dead woman's personal relationships, rather than her politics, may have motivated the killer. The second story, Music City Breakdown, gives Jonathan Kellerman's consulting psychologist, Alex Delaware, a little more to do after Nashville detectives probing the stabbing murder of recording artist Jack Jeffries learn that Delaware had been treating the dead man. The solution is as unsurprising as that of My Sister's Keeper. (Nov. 21)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From

The Kellermans have been writing together and separately for decades. Their latest collaboration seems thrown together and listless compared with the high suspense they are capable of generating. This book houses two novellas set in two different state capitals. Each has a different writing style, grating in its own way. The first novella, "My Sister's Keeper," takes the high-romance road toward inflated writing. Set in Berkeley, California, the story centers on the murder of Congresswoman Davida Grayson in her office. Berkeley Police Detective William Barnes, who has known Grayson for years, takes the case, which, naturally presents a host of suspects including Davida's partner, who announces dramatically (and unnecessarily in 2006): "I'm Minette. Her lover." Hackeneyed plot with stilted dialogue. The second novella, "Music City Breakdown," swings the other way, with self-consciously tough-guy prose and a formulaic plot focusing on the murder of an L.A. singer transplanted to Nashville. The dialogue sounds forced throughout, the plot plods along, barely overcoming nearly indigestible chunks of backstory. The Kellermans' track record ensures demand for this distinctly lesser effort, but even devoted fans are likely to be disappointed. Connie Fletcher
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved