Capital Crimes

Bestselling suspense authors Jonathan and Faye Kellerman team up for a pair of mysteries whose theme is capital cities. MY SISTER'S KEEPER moves between Berkeley and Sacramento, California, and involves the murder of a progressive state representative. The story focuses primarily on female figures, so Carrington MacDuffie does the reading. The other story, MUSIC CITY BREAKDOWN, takes place in Nashville, Tennessee. The plot involving music and murder is more male-oriented, and Stephen Hoye reads. Both narrators distinguish characters well with slight changes of tone or accent, and without artifice. Their pacing makes for easy listening. It would have been helpful had the publisher labeled which stories are on which discs. The stories break between discs, however. R.C.G. (c) AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine

October 16, 2006
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
.