The Skin Gods » (Reprint)

Richard Montanari is a novelist, screenwriter, and essayist. His work has appeared in the Chicago Tribune, Detroit Free Press, Cleveland Plain Dealer, and scores of other national and regional publications. He is the OLMA-winning author of the internationally acclaimed thrillers The Rosary Girls, Kiss of Evil, Deviant Way, and The Violet Hour. Visit the author’s website at www.richardmontanari.com.

With the breakneck pacing and intricate plotting of his most recent novel, The Rosary Girls, Richard Montanari established himself as one of the most exciting suspense writers working today. Now he proves himself a virtuoso with The Skin Gods, an explosive new thriller featuring Philadelphia homicide detectives Kevin Byrne and Jessica Balzano.

It is the steaming heart of summer in the City of Brotherly Love. Back on the force after taking a bullet during the arrest of a sadistic murderer, Detective Kevin Byrne warily returns to police headquarters. He cannot shake the memory of the Rosary Killer’s innocent victims–or his growing sense that the evil has not been vanquished. And when he and his partner, Detective Jessica Balzano, are called in on a bizarre case, Byrne’s gravest suspicions are confirmed.

A madman, dubbed The Actor by the homicide unit, is meticulously re-creating Hollywood’s most famous–and most gruesome–death scenes. The first murder is caught on film, spliced into a rented VHS edition of the Hitchcock black-and-white masterpiece Psycho. But in place of Janet Leigh is a real-life woman, and this time, the blood is red and the knife is real. Soon, more thrilling classics are turned into terrifying snuff films and placed on video store shelves for an unsuspecting public to find.

The key to this horrific puzzle could lie with any of The Skin Gods’ supporting cast: the A-list Hollywood director, the ruthless executive assistant, the convicted mass murderer–or perhaps someone else who has made a sinister art of gruesome violence.

Hot on the psychopath’s trail, Balzano and Byrne descend into the mouth of madness and beyond, deep into the depraved underworld of S&M clubs and the porn industry, where the worship of flesh leads to malevolent evil. Before the final credits roll, the investigators will discover that none of The Actor’s victims are as innocent as they appear to be, and that the clue the police need to prevent future murders might be found in Detective Byrne’s own dark past.

Publishers Weekly

In this high-body-count chiller from the author of The Rosary Girls, Philadelphia homicide detectives Jessica Balzano and Kevin Byrne are up against a savagely inventive serial killer with a yen for stomach-churning cinema verit . Copycat murders modeled on Psycho, Fatal Attraction and other movies are terrorizing the city, as the "auteur" slayer splices film of his bloody re-enactments into rental videos surreptitiously stolen from and then returned to video stores. Byrne, recovering from a near-fatal gunshot wound and swallowing Vicodin like candy, is working half time, so it's up to his eager partner, Balzano, to take the lead in the investigation. Montanari's short, punchy chapters propel the convoluted-and kinky-plot, which caroms between the big-budget movie sets of a Philadelphia filmmaker made good and an underground porn industry where good girls go bad. Several potential perpetrators rear their creepy heads, but the real killer comes out of left field-though readers very attentive to scattered clues won't be too taken aback by the gory denouement. Byrne's awkward relationship with his deaf teenage daughter, Colleen, after his divorce, and Balzano's concern for her precocious three-year-old daughter, Sophie, after she boots her philandering husband (and fellow cop) out of the house, add welcome humanity to a grisly, atmospheric thriller. (Mar.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.