Fallen Angels Murder Club: Heroes and Felons (Brain Power Studios, Lifetime, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night Lifetime showed two consecutive “premiere” movies in a row from 8 to midnight, and I watched both of them. The first, Fallen Angels Murder Club: Heroes and Felons, was, like last week’s Fallen Angels Murder Club: Friends to Die For, was written and directed by Rhonda Baraka based on one of a series of novels by R. Franklin James. (R. Franklin James is also a woman – the “R.” stands for “Rae” – and she grew up in the East Bay Area across the bay from San Francisco even though the Fallen Angels books are set in Philadelphia.) Though this one didn’t have the insouciant charm of Friends to Die For – which was a good job reproducing the overall air of the comedy-mysteries of the 1930’s in a modern-day setting – it was still a compelling feature and shows off Rhonda Baraka’s talent: she’s one woman Lifetime director (along with Christine Conradt and Vanessa Parise) who deserves feature-film assignments. This time the Fallen Angels, a group of amateur sleuths who are all convicted felons, assemble to solve the murder of their former parole officer, Jeffery Wallace (Rob Stewart), who had the idea to organize the book club in the first place.

They soon discover that though he lived an exemplary above-board existence and didn’t live above the means provided by his official parole-officer’s salary, he had $5 million stashed away in a secret bank account in the Cayman Islands. He also had a second wife, Joelle Wallace (Kelly Hu), whom he married after his first wife died, and a son by wife number one, Brian Wallace (Seamus Patterson), who’s never got along with his stepmother. (The explanation of where the money came from is that once Jeffery Wallace took a payoff to get money he needed for his first wife’s medical bills – but this just raises more questions than it answers, including how the sum grew to $5 million – do Cayman Islands banks pay that much interest on their deposits? Most bank-haven banks pay virtually no interest at all because that’s the price you pay for security and secrecy.) The antagonism between the two is palpable, especially when heroine Hollis Morgan (Toni Braxton, who in addition to acting and executive-producing it also may have contributed the Black soul song heard at one point two-thirds of the way through the action … or maybe not, since I don’t know Toni Braxton’s voice well enough to be able to tell) has a meeting with both of them to review the estate and break the news that Jeffery Wallace had $5 million in a Cayman bank account that neither of them seemed to know about. Ironically, both Jeffery and Joelle were having affairs, though Jeffery’s was with Fallen Angels member Abby Caldwell (Lisa Berry) and was just a one-night stand, while Joelle’s was more serious. She had met and fallen in love with Dorian Fields (David Julian Hirsh), who posed as a philanthropist and organized a phony “charity” that only benefited himself.

One of Hollis’s friends, investigative reporter Kaila Gentry (Sugenja Sri), was working on a story about Dorian’s phony “charity,” based on information from a secret source close to the operation, only she s killed in a murder that’s deliberately staged to look like a suicide. Hollis is determined to find out who killed both her friends and also to identify the source Kaila had cultivated, and in the end – not to anyone’s surprise – it turns out that Joelle killed her husband so he didn’t get in the way of her plans with Dorian; and Dorian killed Kalia to keep his dastardly secret scam from being exposed. Both are arrested at a gala featuring Abby’s fashion designs, which are being auctioned off as a fundraiser for Dorian’s “charity,” by Hollis’s sorta-kinda boyfriend, Detective Johnathan (that’s how imdb.com spells the character’s first name!) Faber (Henderson Wade).

There’s also some by-play between Faber and his politically well-connected police partner, Detective Monica Lincoln (Kaitlyn Leeb), who you’ll remember from Friends to Die For was unquestionably convinced that Hollis murdered her book-club acquaintance Rory Sharma (Raoul Bhaneja), but in this one seems calmer and more down-to-earth even while still determined to play the “bad cop” to Faber’s “good cop.” She wins our admiration when she runs afoul of her father, District Attorney Lincoln (Russell Yuen), who gives her a hard time for going after Dorian when Dorian is one of his biggest campaign contributors – and gets a lecture from her about how she’s a sworn police officer and she’s going to follow the law no matter where it leads or how much political money it costs her dad. In the end Hollis and Detective Faber have an al fresco lunch date eating sandwiches (presumably Philly cheese steaks) from a paper bag, obviously edging their way to some sort of romantic connection. This isn’t as strong a story as Friends to Die For (where the revelation of the murderer was genuinely surprising), and it’s not really much of a whodunit – we know who the good guys are and, even more so, who the bad guys are pretty much from the get-go, ahd the only real surprise is that the promos for this made it seem like Kelly Hu would be a friend and co-detective of Toni Braxton’s instead of one of the villains!