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DEAD IN RED, the second in L.L. Barlett's Jeff Resnick series, is a leisurely, straightforward whodunnit that starts in a straight bar and rapidly heads to a gay one. Jeff is still trying to put his life back together after a vicious mugging gave him both brain damage and a flickering form of psychometry, able to get short flashes of images from touching objects or talking to people. He's living with his brother while he recuperates and tries to rebuild his life, as he is no longer able to be an investigator. Well, not currently able to be an official one, anyway. One day his bartender mentions that his cousin was killed and asks Jeff to look into it, offering him the cousin's early-shift bartending job as a cover. In need of work and curious about his mental flash of a sparkling red high-heeled shoe, Jeff agrees. His brother, a doctor, doesn't like the idea of Jeff working while he heals. Jeff doesn't like the idea of Richard keeping such close tabs on him – in part because Richard should be thinking about his upcoming marriage and in part because he came so close to being killed in the previous book, MURDER ON THE MIND. Richard insists on tagging along anyway, and Jeff's disquiet grows for his brother's heart and safety. The body was dumped on land owned by a knockout gorgeous woman who Richard used to know, and for some reason, Richard's flirty chatting never mentions his fiancée. Worse, when they talk, Jeff gets a flash of bloody hands. Did Cyn have something to do with the crime? The clues all seem to point that way. But it was a man's bloody hands in the vision. Was it the victim bleeding to death, or another crime yet to come? The first half of the book mostly deals with the Jeff and Richard dynamic, their respective love lives, Jeff's guilt over the previous book's events, and his healing from the mugging. The clues to the mystery are fairly straightforward, coming one at a time and without any red herrings or major plot twists until well into the book, meaning that the pacing is so regular that it's boring. At a mere 263 pages, there isn't much room to do anything except go from clue A to clue B without digression anyway. Eventually there is action, but there never is much of an intricate plot. People who want a complex puzzle should look elsewhere; people who are interested in the story of two brothers might enjoy this.
Reviewed by Linnea Dodson, June 2008
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