included them just to remind us of Marathon Man." Melissa - Babe's wife and a philologist, she is the daughter of one of Babe's former professors. Lochte described Melissa as "levelheaded and beautiful". The novel reveals that she was working on fine-tuning the speech of the robotic children in the Tring building that Scylla destroyed. Woodrell argued that Melissa's role in the ending "seems forced." Reception Woodrell described it as "a fast-paced, mayhem-filled, occasionally funny, frequently clever novel." Lochte called it "Sneaky, diabolic, a bit depraved, disturbing, maddening, heartbreaking, manipulative and fascinating." Kirkus Reviews stated that "Goldman's slick delivery[...]provides fairly painless reading" but that Brothers did not have "the memorable punch of Marathon Man." Lehmann-Haupt wrote that the author "bewilders us as to his ultimate aims, and seeks to keep us entertained in the meantime with gimmicks" but that it does not "[puzzle the reader] constructively." The West Coast Review of Books ranked it three of five stars (a "good" review) and stated that it was "a bona fide page-turner." Dobyns said Brothers "is hardly a novel at all but a comic book without pictures, something along the lines of Masters of the Universe. Even the characters have similar names... [it] isn't a novel at all but a book about killing." Publishers Weekly also gave a negative review, stating that it was not a good sequel and "the book's basic premise fails to hold together." Murray wrote that it was mostly "disjointed and agonizingly slow" even though the author used "wit, much of it directed at his own wildly imaginative ploys." Goldman himself later called it "a not-very-terrific book." References Further reading Egan, Sean, William Goldman: The Reluctant Storyteller, Bear Manor Media 2014. External linksBrothers'' - BBC iPlayer Drama (radio drama version; director: Kirsty Williams; writer: Stephen Keyworth; speakers: Tom Burke and Jack Lowden) American thriller novels Novels by William Goldman 1986 American novels Sequel novels