Siblings, Love & Murder (Hammer & Sharpe Noir Mysteries 6) by David E Feldman-review and guest post

Amazon.com / Amazon.ca / B&N / KOBO /

ABOUT THE BOOK: Release Date September 15, 2026

Dinah Hammer keeps her brother Judah’s empire running — the books, the family, the secrets. She’s never let herself want anything for herself. Until Dan Martin walks into her life, and for the first time since her own nightmare with Wallace North, she lets her guard down.

But someone is coming for the Hammers. One of Judah’s men is murdered and mailed back in pieces — a warning from an enemy no one can name.

Judah calls in private investigator Sam Sharpe, newly sober and never quite free of this family, to find out who. What they uncover is bigger than a turf war.

When the attack finally comes, it doesn’t just draw blood. It shatters what’s left of the family’s innocence, drags a twelve-year-old boy into manhood at gunpoint, and forces Dinah and Judah to become people they swore they’d never be.

Some families protect each other. The Hammers go to war.

•••••

REVIEW:SIBLINGS, LOVE AND MURDER is the sixth and final instalment in David E Feldman’s contemporary, adult SHARPE AND HAMMER NOIR MYSTERIES crime thriller series.

SOME BACKGROUND: Inspired by real-world political and social tensions, the series examines power, corruption, and the personal consequences of moral compromise

NOTE: Due to the nature of the story line premise, there may be triggers for more sensitive readers.

Told from several omniscient third person perspectives including Dinah Hammer, and PI Sam Sharpe SIBLINGS, LOVE AND MURDER focuses on the hunt for a killer(s), and the identity of a new competitor taking aim at the Hammer Crime Organization. Judah Hammer is the head of the Hammer Crime Organization, and as such, is about to face an unknown enemy, who is determined to undermine the family run Hammer Organization including weapons and drug supplies. Meanwhile, single mother Dinah Hammer is about to place her trust in a man she meets at the local grocery store, a man, who on the surface may be too good to be real.

The world building focuses on a fight for power and control. The Hammer Crime Organization is desperate for help, and call on PI Sam Sharpe to dig up close and personal for any information that will prepare them for war. Sam Sharpe has been beaten down and struggling to move forward, while the darkness continues to embrace the deeper he falls. Criminal enterprise, betrayal, loss and grief, are but the stepping stones for a family facing an unwelcome outcome.

There is a large ensemble cast of colorful, determined and often questionable secondary and supporting characters including the Hammer siblings, supportive of one another yet fractured where it counts.

SIBLINGS, LOVE AND MURDER is the culmination of six story lines, where the past often controls the future, and trust must be earned before giving freely. The premise is suspenseful, dramatic and edgy; the characters are desperate, dynamic and dangerous.

Copy supplied for review

Reviewed by Sandy

Why I Write About Damaged People Who Refuse to Stay Broken

Every book is a mystery—even books that aren’t in the mystery genre. We all want to know what happens next in any compelling story.

As a mystery and crime author, I love crafting the puzzles, red herrings, and solutions surrounding the murders in my books. But there’s another kind of mystery I love writing every bit as much, and it occurs in all of my books: the human mystery.

I love writing about damaged people and how they heal—or try to. What happens when they succeed? What happens when they fail?

Murders are investigated and, ultimately, solved. But the human mysteries go on. The people involved struggle to face—or deny—the challenges in their lives and find ways to live with themselves. These are the mysteries I’m most drawn to.

I love uncovering the truths about damaged people who struggle to live with what they’ve done or what has been done to them. Some refuse to let their actions or experiences define them. Others fail and are consumed by that failure. For still others, the struggle goes on…and on and on.

In my new book, Siblings, Love, & Murder (Hammer & Sharpe Mystery Thrillers, Book 6), Dinah Hammer lives with her past. After years of abuse at the hands of crime boss Wallace Roth, she waited and waited, and finally killed him in cold blood.

And she was just fine with that.

Since that day, several years before Siblings takes place, she has studiously avoided relationships with men. But now she is swept off her feet by a charming gentleman she meets in the produce section of a supermarket, and she makes the conscious choice to be vulnerable again.

My new story examines Dinah’s struggle with trauma, violence, and loss—and how these affect her as a woman and as a mother to her son, Joshua, who has endured not only his mother’s trauma, but his own.

Her brother, Judah, adores his “little” sister and struggles with guilt over what she’s endured. But Dinah’s story is less about what happened to her than about what she decides to do going forward.

I put all of my characters through their own crucibles, and perhaps Dinah more than most. If you read Siblings, be sure to buckle up. Her roller coaster is still rolling, with plenty more mountains and valleys in store.

What I love about Dinah is her resilience. She takes a ton of damage, but she keeps coming back, redefining herself. Damage isn’t weakness. Do her scars define her? You’ll find out.

Sam Sharpe, too, has his battles. He’s a private eye with a drug problem, and he struggles with “The Beast,” as he calls it. Sometimes he wins; sometimes he doesn’t. But like Dinah, he fights on.

All of my characters fight battles—some external, many internal. They are scarred, and sometimes they fall. And when they do, the people around them must live with the consequences—and sometimes with their own contributions to that fall.

Perhaps I’m fascinated by these battles because they have been so much a part of my own life. I experienced quite a lot of early-life trauma, which I dealt with through addiction, depression, and all sorts of acting-out behaviors. I also read. A lot. Books took me away from the trauma and pain.

Eventually, I began redefining myself. I got clean and sober—32+ years as I write this—and transcended depression. And I discovered what became my ultimate coping skill: writing.

Maybe that’s why I keep creating characters who are damaged but refuse to stay broken. I don’t believe our scars simply disappear. We carry them with us. But we can decide what we do with them and who we become because of—or in spite of—them.

That’s what I ask my characters to do, and it’s what I’ve tried to do myself.

Writing is my alchemy.

I channel pain into art.