Fraterfamilias Review

"Templar knights, shamanism, Russian mobsters, and immortality." Those are the things Fraterfamilias by Judith Doloughan and Paula R. Stiles promises. Sadly, the book only delivers on one and a half of them. Fraterfamilias tells the story of two seemingly immortal brothers--Paul Michel Farrell aka Pavya and Alan Kedward aka Alain aka Alexei Bakunin aka Ayanke--and their story...No really that's about it. The biggest problem I had with Fraterfamilias is that it is almost 100% set up for a sequel. Read on for more.

Fraterfamilias opens with French artist Paul Farrell, who's wanted in Paris for a quadruple homicide, getting off a plane in New York City. He baits the cops that are there to arrest him into shooting him. But he doesn't die. Thanks to the fact that both he and his brothers are very, very old shamans (of some sort) he's able to survive. The rest of the novel alternates between multiple characters. There's Inspector Ballard and Jonah Parker, two Interpol agents trying to track down Farrell and his brother Alan Kedward. There's Detective Charlie Rains, a New York cop who gets blackmailed by the mysterious Man In Black, and finally there's Bobby Corazon, Kedward's graduate student assistant.


After Kedward steals Farrell's body from the ER, the rest of the book is just about the police trying to track him down. Fraterfamilias is over 300 pages long, and around page 200, I found myself thinking, "Where is this going?" Books in a series are supposed to work like this: some questions are answered but they lead to bigger questions. Fraterfamilias never answers any of its questions.


For instance, the four people Farrell killed were Russian gangsters. He killed them for revenge because they killed his wife, but by the end of the book I still had no idea why Farrell's wife was killed. Same thing for the Man In Black. We learn his name by the very end of book, and the book assures the reader that yes, knowing his name is very important, but nothing happens with it. Everything about the plot in Fraterfamilias points to the fact that the authors were preparing to write a series or at least a sequel. Sadly, I don't think I would read the sequel.


It's not that the book is poorly written. The characters were interesting, and I particularly liked Inspector Ballard because he was a cop who actually cared about the people he was chasing rather than just going after them because "they broke the law."


Fraterfamilias did have some strange stylistic choices though. The chapters from Kedward's point of view are all written as if he was addressing his brother. The inclusion of the second person "you" just felt strange. It actually kept me from being immersed rather than helping the process.  Kedward also had so many names and aliases that it got a little confusing, especially in the beginning, to keep track of them all. Finally--this two are really minor--it's strange to read a sentence about a grown man (over 50) putting his hands on his tummy. And, as far as I know, all the French is correct in this book, but I did notice an error one of the few times a character spoke Spanish.


Really it all comes down to pacing issues. Not enough happens here because we're supposed to wait for a sequel. The fact that one of the authors tragically passed away from cancer a couple of years ago means that a sequel might not happen. Also, the novel first started out as weekly serial in 2005, so that could explain why I felt like there was a lot of repetition, especially during the chapters with the Interpol officers.


Fraterfamilias isn't a bad book. It was however a bland book. I was excited after reading the back cover and the blurb. All of those things mashed together sounds awesome, but the novel fails to deliver. Instead it features a plodding plot that raises questions that don't get answered. It's a shame that a novel that starts off with a murder ends up being a slow read.