My Brother’s Keeper

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. (Mar.)