Suspense author to have book signing at Borders
By Charles Cassady
happenings
Published March 29, 2005

Cleveland area author Richard Montanari, whose previous novels were set in Cleveland, will be at Borders Books and Music in Crocker Park in Westlake this Friday at 7 p.m.

B-Ware Video and Book, that purple-painted storefront dedicated to screen weirdness, on Madison Avenue in Lakewood, may be gone. But it is commemorated, to a degree, in the new thriller novel “The Skin Gods,” by Cleveland Heights author Richard Montanari.

In the book a serial killer in Philadelphia commits murders patterned after famous movie homicides, like those in “Psycho” and “Fatal Attraction.” His initial crimes he edits into rental videotapes swiped from a B-Ware-inspired mom-and-pop rental place.

“I just had a foundation in film all my life,” said Montanari, a local freelance movie critic before he embarked on a successful career as a thriller novelist. “It allowed me to write about something [for which] I didn’t have to look anything up.”

Montanari has a book-signing and discussion at Borders Books and Music in Crocker Park in Westlake this Friday at 7 p.m.

“The Skin Gods,” published by Random House, follows Montanari’s 2005 book for the same imprint, “The Rosary Girls,” which introduced his new running characters, battle-scarred Philadelphia Homicide veteran Kevin Byrne and his new partner, an amateur boxer in a troubled marriage, Det. Jessica Balzano. In their first outing the pair hunted a monstrous murderer who targeted schoolgirls and left clues with a foundation in traditional Catholic prayer ritual.

The faintly “Da Vinci Code” mixture of church esoterica and modern crime-scene investigation in “The Rosary Girls” proved popular with readers, both here and overseas; Montanari’s page-turner has sold particularly well in France and the U.K. Now, after “The Skin Gods,” he is working on a third volume for Random House with the duo of Byrne and Balzano.

Montanari’s prose can be gruesome, in the tradition of Jeffrey Deaver (“The Bone Collector”) or Thomas Harris (“The Silence of the Lambs”), and the author is a big fan of celluloid shockers like “Se7en” and “The Wicker Man.” 

“If it’s worth doing it’s worth overdoing,” he said. “…But always I try to balance it with the humanity in the main characters.”

For a fresh dose of that humanity, Montanari changed the locale of his storytelling from Cleveland (setting for his three previous crime-thriller books, “The Violet Hour,” “The Deviant Way” and “Kiss of Evil”) to the City of Brotherly Love. Philadelphia (where some of Montanari’s family lives) is a major metropolitan area with twice the population of Cleveland. Yet it’s a locale he says is severely underutilized in suspense-genre fiction.

“I’m right on top of the scene, and I know no more than five or ten novelists [there]. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t want people in Philadelphia to start writing thrillers. I like the elbow room.”

His book-tour schedule takes him to Philly in April. “It’s fairly crime-ridden, and there’s only about 65 full-time homicide detectives there. I am very admiring of these people and how their minds work...There’s a lot of material in that city. No one is really covering it.”

He researched law enforcement through some fortuitous connections in the City of Brotherly love, like Seamus McCaffery, a former homicide cop, now a superior court judge. “That’s really rare.”

The writer was able to go on ride-alongs with police detectives, witnessing suspect arrests and case resolutions first-hand. “When they catch them and they look for that `gotchya’ moment, it’s what they live for…It’s really an amazing thing to watch.”

But do real-life police officers spend their off-hours reading procedural-thriller fiction like “Skin Gods” or watching TV-PD shows? “No and no,” Montanari said emphatically.

“There have been times with uniformed officers and detectives, and I’ve said, `Did you see “Cold Case” last week?’ And they say, `What’s that?’”

In addition to writing his “high body-count thrillers,” Montanari also generates original movie screenplays (a good overview of his work is on his website www.richardmontanari.com). Surprisingly, he doesn’t try to adapt his published prose fiction, nor does he restrict himself to killers and cops. Two of his unproduced scenerios are romantic comedies.

“I like something well done in about every genre...I think suspense and romantic comedies are always going to be made. People love thrillers - and they love romantic comedies.”

On the Web:

• "The Skin Gods" at Random House
• Richard Montanari's Web site