I read this as part of the "Double Homicide" short story duology Faye Kellerman wrote with her husband. I whipped through this. Couldn't put it down. It doesn't exactly mean I'll read her other stuff, but it's points in her column towards it, as it were. The way she paces the story is engaging. Her descriptions are rich and seem to leap to life, even with the word economy that comes with short stories. I had no clue who the murderer was, but I had some ideas that were wrong, which I was happy about. The book ends on a weird note, but I attributed this to her writing more novels than she does short stories. I'm glad I was able to find and read this again. ( )

More about the detectives and less about the actual mystery. ( )

Interesting but not compelling, sidebar for two very successful mystery writers. ( )

I really enjoy Faye Kellerman and Jonathan Kellerman-- but when they write together, the story gets convoluted. I didn't enjoy this at all, but that might have had more to do with the difference in the way the story was told rather than the writing. Not my style. ( )

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. 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.

Efforts of a husband and wife team are evident in this book. I love Jonathan Kellerman's Alex Delaware books and Faye Kellerman's Peter Decker series, but this was just hard to follow and the different writing styles was difficult to get used to. The story line was good in spite of all this so I gave it three stars. ( )