The Golem of Paris

September 21, 2015
The Kellermans’ uneven sequel to 2014’s The Golem of Hollywood finds Det. Jacob Lev of the LAPD assigned to a clerical job in a remote airplane hangar east of Los Angeles after antagonizing his superiors in his last case. Special Projects, a recently formed group, has Jacob under 24-hour surveillance. In his boredom, Jacob becomes engrossed in the unsolved Marquette case from 2004, in which a mother and her five-year-old son were found shot in the forehead, their bodies in posed positions with their eyelids removed. When Jacob discovers a similar murder previously committed in France, those in charge grudgingly allow him to travel to Paris to investigate. Jacob’s journey to uncover the killer leads him to explore several generations of interlocking family histories throughout Europe. The sophisticated, smart beginning, which interweaves interesting characters from different time frames, compensates only in part for the extended passages of tedious prose that bog down the novel’s second half.

September 1, 2015
Detective Jacob Lev takes on a brutal cold case and discovers that the murder has connections to his mother's murky past, a scary Russian oligarch, and a recent murder in Paris. After his last case (The Golem of Hollywood, 2014, etc.), which had him questioning his sanity and sort-of believing in supernatural monsters of retribution and which landed him in crime-fighting purgatory, Jacob is assigned to archiving cold cases in an industrial warehouse. But one of them, the gruesome 2004 murder of a mother and son, piques his interest, possibly because of his own background-he had long believed his own mother to be dead, but she's now catatonic and living in a health care facility. Investigating the murder leads him to Paris, where a recent crime is an eerie echo of his case, and a Paris investigator seems determined not to see the connection. In pursuing his main suspect, a Russian billionaire, Jacob finds a chilling connection to his mother's past and a fateful trip she made to Czechoslovakia in her youth. Shadowing the investigation and his life are the enigmatic members of the Special Projects team and Mai, who's apparently the mythological golem and yet so much more. Father and son Kellermans continue their co-written Golem series with a fascinating and frightening glimpse into an imagined religious supernatural subculture and the very real brutality and inscrutability of Eastern Bloc secret police networks while also spinning an engaging crime-solving tale and setting up a more distinct Lev family link to the mysterious and unearthly events that will certainly keep popping up as long as Mai is free. A curious yet compelling mix of adventure, crime, and horror with paranormal and historical elements.

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