Jessica Balzano & Kevin Byrne series by Richard Montanari

The Author

In 2005 he began his Philadelphia crime series with The Rosary Girls, a police procedural thriller set inside the homicide unit of the Philadelphia Police Department, introducing detectives Kevin Byrne and Jessica Balzano.

Montanari was born in Northeast Ohio, where he still resides.

The Books

Kevin Byrne and Jessica Balzano are police officers in Philadelphia.

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.

The books in suggested reading order
The Rosary Girls
The Skin Gods
Merciless
Play Dead
The Echo Man
The Killing Room
The Stolen Ones
The Doll Maker
Shutter Man
A Christmas Killing