The Golem of Paris

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. (Nov.)