Not my favorite genre but I’m cleaning my TBR and I have a few thrillers to read and this is the best I’ve read recently.
It did not blow my mind, and it’s definitely dark but it was a goos mystery and good characters.
The duo of cops was my favorite. New partners, I was a bit worried because the new cop joining the crime department was a lady and I was afraid of the clichés of the genre but I was happily surprised to see their relationship starting as equal and see them evolve slowly to a good partnership to read about (as well as it could develop in the few days of their first case I mean). But yeah, I enjoyed the characters.
And I might read another book with them (if there’s any, gotta check)

Richard Montanari, Rosary Girls (Ballantine, 2005)

I always approach a new (well, new-to-me) ongoing mystery series with trepidation. Not because I fear I'll hate it. In fact, I have a lot fewer problems with those I hate, since I can just abandon them. But, you see, I'm a reader of George R. R. Martin. I've waited ten years for what is, essentially, volume four of A Song of Ice and Fire (A Feast for Crows, which popped up six years ago, was the first half of volume four. A Dance with Dragons, supposedly coming out in July 2011, is the second half. And I'll believe it's coming out when I'm holding it in my hands; this is the fifth release date I've seen for it). No, I'm afraid I'm going to love it, in which case I will end up, at one point, waiting for new volumes to come out. So despite my curiosity about the Balzano and Byrne books from Richard Montanari, which have garnered a good deal of good press over the years, I resisted trying them. Then Badlands came out, which was widely hailed as the best of the lot, and I figured I should probably start reading these things. So I took Rosary Girls, the first in the series, on vacation with me last month and gave it a whirl. I figured what the heck, I have a week to get through it if it doesn't capture my interest. Thankfully, that night my wife was sleeping downstairs (taking night shift with a cousin's new baby), so I didn't have to turn the light off early. And twenty-four hours later, I was turning to the next piece of fiction I'd brought on the trip, because I'd blasted through this.

The jacket copy made me think Byrne was your basic maverick cop, but I didn't really get that from the beginning of the book; I thought he was perhaps a little more gung-ho, but not Dirty Harry. (This actually becomes very important later in the book; always beware of trusting your jacket copy.) Soon after we open, Byrne is called to the scene of a homicide in Philadelphia: a Catholic school girl has been found dead, in a pose that suggests a piece of religious artwork. It's nasty stuff indeed, and it only gets worse at the autopsy. Balzano's new partner—his old one is laid up in the hospital post-heart troubles—is young, inexperienced, but sharp Jessica Byrne, and it's she who places the school uniform: her own alma mater. And thus the chase begins. But this being a modern detective novel, where single murders are about as common as white roses growing naturally at the north pole, a second body turns up, and Balzano and Byrne start closing in on a suspect. Unfortunately, the Diocese of Philadelphia, perhaps the most powerful force in the city, may have some interest in keeping their suspect out of the hands of the police. And then there's a tabloid journalist who really, really wants to get Kevin Byrne in some sort of scandal and bring him down...

Montanari kicks things off in high gear and only gets faster from there; there's not a page in this book that isn't breakneck. The mystery is very well-architected, the characters are strong (interesting in a book that's the first of a series; so many series authors these days are taking multiple books to really get into their characters), and while I haven't lived in Philadelphia for a good deal longer than I'd like to admit to, it felt right, from an expatriate's perspective anyway. The ending seemed a bit contrived (not as “the resolution to the mystery”, but as “the beginning to the series”), but I generally don't count points off for it because I'm so used to it these days. A solid beginning to the series, and I'm looking forward to reading more of it. *** 1/2

Absorbing, complex, serial-killer mystery with well-drawn, interesting characters, a dizzying plot, and a gruesome killer.

This book suffers from a) friendless author syndrome, and a variation of that, b) badpad writing. Friendless author syndrome results in a whole slew of named characters come marching in and out of the story and contribute nothing. Only a person with no real friendships could concoct such ciphers and give them names - or perhaps a more cynical author names them and has them tell a few cop stories and then moves on, racking up more pages. Badpad writing, the listing of items in lieu of actual writing, infests this novel. You can't go down a street without hearing about every single business on the street, all of it written in a passive voice, as in, "there was a nail shop, and there was a check cashing place, and there was a liquor store, and there was a convenience store." Then the people wandering around and doing stuff, "There was an older man who was smoking a cigarette and was sitting on a park bench and was reading a paper. There was a kid riding a bike. There was a woman chasing after her kid, who was wearing a Pokemon t-shirt, jeans, and a pair of purple shoes."

Who cares? I do not care. Get to the point. Tell us the story. Only, obviously, there really isn't much of a story here. Really bad.