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Posted 06 June 2006 - 02:33 AM
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It's every Philadelphia cop's dream to make it to the homicide unit. For Jessica Balzano, formerly on traffic detail, she couldn't be more excited or more anxious. Jessica jumps in feet first when, on day one, she and her partner--the confident Kevin Byrne, who has a reputation for skillfully but unconventionally solving murders--get a call saying that a homeless man has found the dead body of a teenage girl. The victim turns out to be Tessa Wells, a student at the same Catholic girls' high school that Jessica attended. Returning to the school to investigate brings back memories of Jessica's high-school woes, but teenage growing pains pale in comparison to Tessa's fate--raped and murdered with a rosary, which quickly becomes the killer's calling card, tied around her hands. Montanari jumps between following the investigation and tracking the killer as the horrific events unfold. This high-concept, heavily promoted thriller--the first of what promises to be a grisly series starring two likable Philly detectives
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The scene is carefully set--a teenage parochial school girl, artfully posed in death with her arms chained around a graffiti-scarred pillar, clutching a rosary and a picture of a religious painting by Robert Blake. The next three murder victims are found in similar tableaus, each one suggesting the next in a string of calculated killings whose themes are foretold in the sorrowful mysteries familiar to Catholic scholars. It takes Philadelphia detective Jessie Balzano back to her own adolescence and a priest who understands what the grisly slayings are about, but by the time she realizes who's next on the murderer's list and why, time has nearly run out for Jessie and her own daughter. Along with her new partner Kevin Byrne, a former superstar cop with his own secret past and a disturbing tendency to read killers' minds, Jessie makes a strong debut in Montanari's uneven, overwrought thriller, whose Gothic touches--like "living ghosts hovering in darkness, hollow-eyed and craven" in "a Gethsemane amid the cracked concrete and rotten wood and ruined dreams" to describe the abandoned cellar where the first crime took place, for example--too often overpower an otherwise satisfying read
This look really good and Start really so far..
