The Skin Gods - Richard Montanari

The Skin Gods is written by Sunday Times bestselling author Richard Montanari, who is also the author of the bestselling thriller 'The Rosary Girls.' The main characters in the book are Detective Kevin Byrne & Detective Jessica Balzano. When a video of Alfred Hitchcock's legendary horror film psycho is taken to the police, a horrific crime is discovered, in the middle of the movie somebody has edited over the famous murder in the shower scene with their own murder scene and left the film in a small rental shop for an unsuspecting person to find. With an apparent homicide on their hands, but no body, no crime scene and no suspects, the homicide ...  Read the complete review

In the heat of Philadelphia, a violent murder has taken place. A beautiful young woman is violently slashed to death in a motel bathroom. But this is no straight-forward murder. It comes to the attention of the Philadelphia Police Department by way of a rented movie. Hitchcock's horror movie Psycho has a slight differentiation - in the scene where the actress Janet Leigh should have been stabbed, there is now a scene of a real and violent murder. The killer has recreated the famous Hollywood murder scene and has inserted it into the movie, putting it back onto the rental store's shelves for an unsuspecting public to find. Detectives Kevin Byrne and ...  Read the complete review

When I read, I tend to not be very adventurous. I normally stick with an author I know or have heard of before. Recently, I have ventured further afield, and while I have kept within the lines of a crime thriller, my favourite genre, I have explored different authors, and the latest of these is Richard Montanari. His novel, The Skin Gods, is set in Philadelphia, and from the blurb, it seemed to feature a pairing of detectives hot on the heels of a serial killer - not vey original, but I thought I would give it a go. Montanari probably knows that the genre and substance of his characters is a much explored one, and you can see signs of a James Patterson ...  Read the complete review

As hubby is out on the road most of the week, living in his lorry as he tramps goods from one place to another, he gets a lot of time on his hands. Sitting in queues waiting to be loaded, waiting in queues to be unloaded, sitting at truck stops waiting for changeovers, and all that jazz means sitting in one spot, with nothing to do but just SIT. It's hardly surprising then that that every opportunity, he is on the look out for something to read to help occupy his time. He is actually quite a fussy reader, having quite high standards that he wants met with his reads as well, so when he came home with this paperback and said he thought I should read it, I took notice. ...  Read the complete review

I hadn't read for ages, despite being a very enthusiastic reader when I was younger. I thought it was definitely time to get back into it, and this book was what I chose to start with. Despite initially being unimpressed, as the book progressed it just got better and better. The story focuses on two detectives who look into the murder of several innocents by the so called "Actor," a crazy serial-killer who likes to re enact his favourite grisly scenes from films. The first killing is the re enactment of the famous shower scene from Psycho, and then with some technical wizardry the Actor replaces the real scene with his own on a rental tape, and ...  Read the complete review