Mystery Monday: The Doll Maker!

Our book today is The Doll Maker by Richard Montanari (from Mulholland Books), that author’s eight installment in his series of police procedurals set among the mean streets of present-day Philadelphia and starring grizzled police detective Kevin Byrne and his younger, smarter partner Jessica Balzano. This latest adventure opens in a typically gripping fashion, with insomniac Detective Byrne sitting late-night stakeout on the scene of an earlier bodega robbery and murder. Byrne is certain the killer of the bodega owner will be coming back for his discarded murder weapon, because they always do:

Even though there was always the distinct possibility that the police knew where you had stashed the weapon, and might be watching that spot in case you came back, in Kevin Byrne’s experience, that had never stopped them.

Not once.

Montanari puts some clear and well-intentioned effort into crafting Detective Balzano into a three-dimensional character, but even so, these books really belong to Detective Byrne, an embattled and sharp-minded veteran who’s seen, as he often reflects, enough of the hard knocks of the police world for three lifetimes. There’s always such a character in police procedurals (including the televised kind, as the innumerable fans of Law & Order‘s Lenny Briscoe will attest), and Byrne keeps up the team spirit by regularly coming out with weathered apothegms about life on the job:

There were some who believed that the police, as a rule, were stumbling oafs who only managed to catch the dumb criminals. While the argument for this was persuasive, to some, it was not true. For Kevin Byrne, as well as for most of the lifers he knew, the saying was a little different.

You catch the dumb ones first.

“Rule number one of any homicide detective was to never take any case personally,” Byrne reflects, but he himself regularly disregards that rule, and fiery-tempered Detective Balzano needs little prodding to disregard it as well, especially in the case they face in this latest adventure. A maniac or team of maniacs is kidnapping and killing children, posing their bodies in macabre tableaux – and promising to go on killing at regular intervals unless the stalwarts of the Philadelphia PD can stop the pattern. Byrne ‘s determination to save the kidnapped children vies with his worldly experience in terms of the cold realities involved:

He knew that, when it came to finding missing children, investigators spoke in terms of months, sometimes weeks, more often in days. The more time that passed, the less likely it would be that the children would be located alive and well.

No one spoke in terms of years.

Montanari handles the constantly-increasing tensions of his narrative with the polish of an old adept. I wouldn’t have thought he could top last year’s The Stolen Ones, but The Doll Maker is not only faster-paced but also far more psychologically disturbing and creepy. And it’s longer, which, when it comes to a series this good, is a happy extra.