Another great read, really enjoyed this one ( )

If you’re going to write great cop fiction, you need two things: great cops and great villains. Richard Montanari has both in his Philadelphia police series and his latest installment, Badlands, delivers an exceptionally creepy villain. This particular killer leads detectives on a scavenger hunt around Philadelphia, leaving clues and bodies for them to find. A dead runaway in a dry, abandoned basement, inexplicably dead of drowning. An old refrigerator in a vacant lot with a grisly surprise. A strange name spelled out in Scrabble tiles at the scene of a suicide. A bible with curious markings. An ancient Chinese tangram puzzle. Video clues on a goth website. The killer’s own Masterpiece Theater.

For great cop fiction, you also need great cops. Detectives Kevin Byrne and Jessica Balzano are great characters — gritty street cops with no romantic involvement (thank heavens) and complicated personal lives who make a really effective team. They have been through a lot together in previous books. They care about each other, but there is still some distance between them; if you’re going to work that closely, you need to be very cautious about each other’s personal space. They have their secrets, but there is a lot they share.

And on the topic of great cops, this series has one of my very favorite characters: Joshua Bontrager, Philadelphia’s only Amish homicide detective. It could really be played for laughs — and there were quite a few when he was first introduced — but after the initial amusement wore off, he earned the respect of his fellow detectives. He has real strengths that have come from his unusual background and he puts them to good use. He is an odd and refreshing presence in the Roundhouse.

Montanari’s villians are always big and dramatic, staging crimes that are more like events. We get a look at the crimes through the murderer’s eyes, learning the background story in flashbacks, woven in and around the detectives and their investigation. The tortured histories are revealed as the story builds to a final confrontation. It’s a format that has worked well in the three previous novels, The Rosary Girls, The Skin Gods, and Merciless.

The night children, the runaways, come to the city by the hundreds, filled with hope and fear and promise. They gather during the day in free spaces: bus and train stations, libraries and museums, art galleries, and cheap eating places. And that's where Joseph Swann, magician, illusionist and conjuror, master of disguises, observes and selects them for his Seven Wonders project. He has a particular type of girl in mind. Each will be a guest in a room in his house until their great moment.

The year is 2008, the city is Philadelphia, referred to once in PLAY DEAD as Killadelphia. When Joseph Swann was born his father, the Great Cygne, momentarily thought he had silver eyes, the mark of the devil. The Great Cygne was a master magician, and each of girls whom Joseph befriends will be matched to one of his father's most remarkable illusions. Joseph's desire for approval, recognition, and the admiration of others stems from the way his father treated him.

The body of the first of Joseph's victims, Caitlin O'Riordan, is discovered in May 2008, carefully posed in a glass display case. In August 2008, by which time the O'Riordan case is already regarded as a "cold case", the body of a second victim is discovered. The investigation becomes the first handled by homicide detectives Kevin Byrne and Jessica Baldano after their transfer to the Special Investigations Unit. Even as multi-stranded investigations into the bodies already discovered begin, the serial killings continue, and the reader is "introduced" to new potential victims.

PLAY DEAD is the first novel I have read where I can recall seeing the Aristotelian Incline so obviously utilised. After the prologue which sets the scene, the novel implements a three act structure. In the final part, Death Clock, the action and tension ratchet up as Byrne and Baldano race against the clock to beat Swann to his horrifying climax.

This is my most satisfying read so far this year. Meticulously plotted, full of puzzles, it is bound together by the heightening tension. I would like to hear what a Philadelphian reader thinks of it. It is one thing to read a book as scary as this one from an outsider's point of view, quite another to read it as an "insider".

There is a lot of back story throughout PLAY DEAD, and in places it makes the main story unfold just that bit more slowly. However by the final section I had come to appreciate why it was there. The only jarring note for me was one of the final chapters that, Poirot-like, "revealed all", and I just wish Montanari had found another way to do it. ( )

Latest Philadelphia based thriller featuring detectives Jessica Balzano and Kevin Byrne. "Play Dead" features a killer reenacting classic magic tricks and killing young women as the finale of his act. Takes a while to warm up but, once it does, it will keep you reading till the end. ( )