"Wonder Woman: Love and Murder"

Before NBC’s must-see Monday night TV, I sat down last night with “Wonder Woman: Love and Murder,” a hardcover collecting best-selling author Jodi Picoult’s run on “Wonder Woman.” Picoult had a big challenge in front of her when she took on the series. She was taking over after a delay-plagued run by Allan Heinberg that didn’t get around to actually concluding until much later and her story had to plug into the “Amazons Attack” miniseries. Within that framework, she came up with a story about Wonder Woman and her formerly dead mom and meeting parents’ expectations, a theme we non-superheroes can relate with. But there were a lot of humorous bits that didn’t work for me, like Wonder Woman dropping the nearly dead but still-wiscracking Nemesis with a thud. It also seemed strange that Wonder Woman was having so much trouble figuring her place in the world. After all, she’d just had a year off to contemplate just that.