Should I Fall

As the wedding of British-born Rachel Grant and her fiancé, NYPD Det. John Frankel, approaches in Shepherd’s middling sequel to 2021’s The Last Commandment, John becomes the primary suspect in a homicide investigation when Rachel discovers his ex-wife, Julia, murdered in his Manhattan apartment. Rachel immediately enlists the help of her father, Austin Grant, a retired Scotland Yard commander, to look for evidence that will exonerate her future husband. While John evades police surveillance and leaves New York in search of answers to Julia’s murder, Rachel and Austin fly to Hawaii, where Julia was living before her fateful trip to New York. The action slows to a crawl as Rachel and Austin attend a luau between fruitless interviews of various characters with little information to provide. Meanwhile, John surfaces in Maine, though why he goes there remains unexplained for too long. Overall, the plotting and structure of the story are lacking, though Shepherd’s screenwriter and showrunner background suggest that with a stiff rewrite this could become a made-for-TV movie. Few readers will look forward to the next in the series. (June)