Double Murder

Frequently mistaken for each other, identical twins Bert and Nan find themselves caught up in a baffling murder mystery when an anonymous stranger, targeting Nan, tries to pick up Bert and then turns up dead.

Most things happen in pairs in this lively mystery narrated by identical twin sisters Nan and Bert, named for the oldest Bobbsey Twins even though the original pair were brother and sister, and written by?who else??identical twins. A housewife in Louisville, Ky., Bert is still licking her wounds after her husband dumped her for his secretary, while Nan, a local deejay for a promotion-happy country music station, tries to be supportive. Accosted by a stranger who says he'll call her later that afternoon for a date, Bert assumes she's been mistaken for Nan. Her sister, however, doesn't recognize the guy's description; both are shocked when he turns up on the TV news as a John Doe homicide victim. The police aren't impressed when Bert reports her conversation with the victim. Next, the sisters find Nan's side of their duplex ransacked, but nothing stolen. The following day, both get mysterious phone calls, Bert's caller asking where "he" is and Nan's demanding "the money." Thoroughly bewildered and without police protection, they realize they must find killer and motive before they are murdered, too. Bert's former husband, good-old-boy Jake, now sporting an earring and tight jeans after 19 years of conservative married life, adds comic relief to this quirky story of revenge and long-held secrets. While this is the authors' first collaboration, Barbara Taylor McCafferty writes the Haskell Blevins mysteries.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In alternating chapters, the identical-twin Tatum sisters of Louisville, Kentucky--straitlaced Bert (newly divorced, mother of college-age kids, Claiborne-attired) and earthy Nan (single, a country-and-western d.j.)--narrate their near-fatal, sometimes farcical involvement with a series of ugly murders. The mayhem commences when a handsome stranger greets Bert on the street as if she were an old girlfriend--and then turns up dead a few hours later. Soon the sisters are being followed, shot at, threatened by phone, and their homes are vandalized. So, getting no help from the oafish homicide cops (who regard them as publicity hounds), the sisters sleuth on their own--interviewing the dead man's wife (the next to die), tracking a suspect to a seedy hotel, and uncovering the key plot point here: That the new killings are linked to the unsolved murders, 25 years ago, of a couple for whom the Tatum twins babysat! And there'll be kidnapping (Nan's) and a car-chase (prim Nan in the hot seat) before the far-fetched yet faintly disturbing windup. (Think Ross Macdonald in his darkest Oedipal mode.) Too grim and gimmicky for steady laughs, but, with rueful one- liners (about Bert's lecherous ex, for example) and droll commentary on twinship (the authors are identicals, too), the odd- couple sisters give an engaging lift to this uninspired, hardworking entertainment. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.