My Brother's Keeper

January 9, 2012
In Gilman’s middling follow-up to Father’s Day (2009), which won the Minotaur Books/PWA Best First Private Eye award, Jimmy Patterson, a former Philadelphia cop colleague of PI Lou Klein’s, asks Lou to help his sister, Franny, who’s having marital trouble with her husband, Brian Haggerty. Lou and Franny have a past, as does Brian, whose first wife, Valerie Price, was in bed with his father, William, when both were shot to death years before. Brian’s alibi for those killings was Franny. Shortly after Lou reluctantly agrees to assist Franny, a dying Jimmy, shot twice in the gut, turns up on Lou’s front porch. Lou gets on a trail that inevitably leads back to the tangled passions that resulted in the deaths of Valerie and William. Gilman’s descriptions of Philadelphia still ring true, but this creaky sophomore effort, with its often brittle dialogue, falls far short of his debut. Agent: Philip Spitzer, Philip G. Spitzer Literary Agency.

March 15, 2012
An ex-cop tries to help out an ex-girlfriend. Franny was the one who got away. Lou Klein chased her, but she preferred other men, marrying several times and winding up with Brian Haggerty, owner of a strip club, who likes to bed and brutalize his staff. Now, according to Franny's brother Jimmy, a cop who grew up with Lou and worked with him on the Philadelphia police force before a righteous blow turned bad, forcing Lou out of the department to set up as a private eye, Franny needs help separating from Brian. But leaving is complicated because a few years back there was some nasty business about Brian's first wife being in bed with his father, then being murdered--a time when Brian's acquittal depended on the alibi Franny gave him. Franny insists that she doesn't need help, but it doesn't seem that way when Jimmy, trying to get her ring back from Brian, winds up dead on Lou's porch, then Franny is stabbed herself. With some assistance from his p.i. partner Joey and caveats from his daughter Maggie, Lou finds himself reopening the case of the first wife's murder and uncovering affairs galore, a paternity coverup and a surprising participant in that bedroom assault. Some grisly bits and overwrought descriptions fail to juice a pedestrian plot lacking the power of Father's Day (2009).

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February 1, 2012
The pain and deceit of the past surface after former Philadelphia cop Jimmy Patterson asks one of his ex-colleagues, Lou Klein, now a PI, to help Jimmy's younger sister, Franny, whose marriage to wealthy Brian Haggerty is troubled. Klein, who has his own past with Franny, remembers suspicion surrounding Haggerty from the unsolved murders of his father, powerful William Haggerty, and Brian's ex-stripper first wife, who were found in bed together. After Franny is violently stabbed and left for dead, Klein, assisted by his partner, Joey Giordano, sets out to uncover the truth about Haggerty and his family's past. The plot of this gritty procedural is short on motivation and heavy on coincidence, but Klein, comfortable back in his Philly locale, is a keeper. Introduced in Gilman's award-winning debut, Father's Day (2009), Klein shows considerable growth here as he mends his relationship with his adult daughter and continues to relive the case that ended his police career.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)