Sister acts: Perri O'Shaunessy, P.J. Parrish -- two sets of sisters who collaborate on murder

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Pam (L) and Marry O'Shaunnessy who write as Perri O'Shaunnessy 

Murder and mayhem seem to run in the family for sisters Pam and Mary O'Shaunessy and Kris and Kelly Parrish.

The two sister acts collaborate on writing murder mysteries.

The O'Shaunessys, writing under the nom de plume Perri O'Shaunessy, have taken their heroine attorney Nina Reilly on her 15th adventure in their new book, "Dreams of the Dead." Kris Montee and Kelly Nichols (the Parrishes), writing as P.J. Parrish, have taken a detour from their Louis Kincaid series to tell the story of Matt Owen, an investigative reporter who travels to Paris to find his sister's killer, in "The Killing Song."

Both sets of sisters are close in age and moved a lot as kids.

"We had to rely on each other," Pam said, explaining how they spent hours reading fiction and putting on garage plays, developing a "shared imagination."

Pam said one of her earliest memories is of "sitting on the floor with our mother holding my baby sister Mary in her lap and dropping her, and me reaching forward and catching her. Mary just fell right into my arms. That's how it still is. Mary would catch me and I would catch her. We lead each other astray, too."

Like their heroine, Pam practiced law in South Lake Tahoe, Calif., for 16 years. She quit after the first Nina Reilly book came out so she and Mary could devote full time to their collaboration. The two women live about an hour apart and have worked in the same room on only one of their books. Most of the work is carried out on the phone or by e-mail.

"I think of it as mowing the lawn," Pam said. "You move the lawnmower forward and move it back. One of us writes a scene and next person gets it and rewrites it and sends it back. Once something is changed, the next person is not allowed to go and put it back. We have to move forward."

The process has produced some fierce disagreements.

"We've had some fights where we'd hang up the phone on each other," Mary said. But in the end, "whoever cared the most won. The strongest case won the day."

The two are always careful of each other's feelings.

"When you're writing fiction, you're very delicate in some ways, very fragile. Sometimes I'll want to change the whodunit completely. She won't tell me we've already got our outline. She'll take me seriously," Pam said.

The O'Shaunessys work from an outline to keep their writing on track while the Parrishes adhere to the old E.L. Doctorow adage about only being able to see as far as your headlights on a foggy road.

"We only plan four or five chapters out," said Kris, a former reporter for the South Florida Sun Sentinel and a former romance novelist.

Her collaboration with Kelly was started as a result of an offhand remark by her husband after Kris' romance novel publisher dropped her and her agent suggested she switch to mysteries.

"I wrote a really bad one but I wanted to try again," Kris said. At the time, Kelly was working in the casino industry and wanted to write but didn't know where to start. So the two got together and invented Louis Kincaid, who became a private investigator after being fired from a job as a police officer.

"He had burdens and demons," Kelly said.

They have stayed away from sex scenes. They tried when Kincaid hooked up with Joette Frye but even former romance writer Kris had trouble turning anything out.

They tried. They were in the same room, computers back-to-back. Kris volunteered to write it. Kelly started typing madly away on the next chapter. After a while Kelly looked up and said, "I don't hear anything." Kris responded with, "I'm thinking. I'm thinking." Pretty soon Kris gave up and Kelly agreed to have a go at it. They switched seats. Pretty soon Kris is typing away madly. A while later she looked up and said, "I don't hear anything." At which point, they gave up.

"We were paralyzed trying to write a love scene," Kris said, saying it's hard to come up with anything that isn't cliche and adding, "It's much more fun to write about villains."

Kris does her writing in Florida while Kelly works in Michigan, 1,200 miles away.

"About a year-and-a-half ago, we discovered Skype," Kris said. "It changed our lives. We can talk to each other free. There's screen-sharing. It's like looking over her shoulder."

The Parrishes have a little ritual when they finish a book.

"One of us will write 'The' and the other will sit down and write 'End' and then we break out a bottle of wine or two."

"Dreams of the Dead" ($25) and "The Killing Song" ($15) are both published by Gallery Books, a division of Simon and Schuster. "The Killing Song" will also be available through Pocket Books ($7.99).