Badlands
A Novel of Suspense
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
“Save this one for a weekend when you won’t have to stop reading.”—The Globe and Mail
A teenage runaway’s body is found in the basement of a rancid tenement building in the desolate, dangerous North Philly district dubbed the Badlands. The inexplicable cause of death: drowning. Months later, this dormant homicide case stirs back to life. A confession to the bizarre murder sends Philadelphia police detectives Kevin Byrne and Jessica Balzano rushing to make an arrest. But what they find will chill these hardened veterans to the bone. As the body count grows, a terrifying design literally takes shape. Pieces of a gruesome puzzle are being set into place by a madman using the city as his game board. His playthings are the innocent, and his opponents—and pawns—are Byrne and Balzano, who must, before time runs out, decipher the truth about a shadowy house of horrors and its elusive master.
BONUS: This edition contains an excerpt from Richard Montanari's The Echo Man.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
