Dial 215 for Murder

Cleveland's Richard Montanari writes a Philly crime thriller

by Justin Bauer

It's interesting, and sometimes telling, to see how a writer uses a city — especially one you know well — as source material: which areas he visits, how his locations influence character and direct action, what he picks up on or misses. This is why, initially, Richard Montanari's Merciless worried me; it's a book with Philly's City Hall on the cover, but it's written by a writer based in Cleveland.

Montanari, to his credit, nails his backdrops. The book opens with a character lamenting the closing of the Silk City diner, up until a month ago a dead-on detail. He goes beyond the tourist tour (Boathouse Row, the Roundhouse) into the neighborhoods that line the Schuylkill. He even draws his fictional settings from area reality, staging a handful of scenes in a theme park akin to an Atlantic County original.

Montanari also puts together an entirely competent serial-killer thriller. While it's hardly groundbreaking — cops hunting pathological murderers haven't done much new since Clarice Starling — Montanari develops his detectives skillfully, and he plays out his plot twists like a seasoned pro, avoiding the lapses in logic or plausibility that handicap much of the genre.

With all of this going for it, though, Merciless is a difficult read. At least, it's difficult in this city, in the middle of this bloody summer. Montanari's highly competent serial-killer ride feels like the wrong book in the wrong place. It's not that Merciless is crime fiction — there are excellent and hard-hitting crime writers who benefit from great love and knowledge of their cities; Dennis Lehane and George Pelecanos in Boston and D.C. are the best at this. Nor is it necessarily the whiteness of Montanari's Philadelphia that scans wrong, even though his entire city seems as homogenous as my old-Irish river ward neighborhood.

Instead, it's the disconnect that comes out of the way Montanari locates madness and rage against a detailed Potemkin Philadelphia. During this increasingly random, violent summer, when kids are shot off bikes and bodies turn up daily, Merciless imagines a city held hostage by a single, logical madman, with a coherent plan and flawless execution, tripped up by dedicated policing. If only it were that easy.

(j_bauer@citypaper.net)

Merciless

By Richard Montanari
Ballantine Books$24.95, 402 pp.