Badlands

Scott Brick, who almost always gets high marks for narration, is at his best when he's a serial killer. He's plotting, maniacal, creepy, and just plain evil. That's what's called for in this latest from Richard Montanari. As it develops, this is the story of a relentless search by two Philadelphia detectives for the killer of several young women. The cops are charged with deciphering obtuse clues left by the madman, which lead them to the next body--or body part. This evildoer is not just smart--he's brilliant. He presides over what amounts to be a house of horrors--with a victim dedicated to each room. Brick keeps you chilled to the bone. A.L.H. (c) AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine

Starred review from July 28, 2008
Philadelphia homicide detectives Kevin Byrne and Jessica Balzano take on a high-profile cold case in Montanari's superior thriller, which combines a genuinely creepy villain with fully fleshed-out victims. The dead-end inquiry into the drowning death of 17-year-old Caitlin O'Riordan four months earlier gets a boost when someone, privy to details never made public, tips the police to an abandoned building in a bad neighborhood that later turns out to house a second corpse. The stakes are raised even higher when another body turns up, an ex-girlfriend of Byrne's who'd worked for the local district attorney. Segments from the killer's perspective increase the tension, and Montanari (Merciless
) does a nice job of concealing one of the murderer's alter egos. The fiend's methods, modeled after elaborate magical tricks, are a welcome change from the gore typical of the serial killer subgenre. Likewise, Byrne and Balzano possess a psychological depth all too rare in such fiction.