The Stolen Ones
-
-
4.2 • 9 Ratings
-
-
- $9.99
-
- $9.99
Publisher Description
In Richard Montanari's chilling new suspense novel, a sealed-off network of secret passages connects all of Philadelphia to the killer hidden within.
Luther Wade grew up in Cold River, a warehouse for the criminally insane. Two decades ago the hospital closed it doors forever, but Luther never left. He wanders the catacombs beneath the city, channeling the violent dreams of Eduard Kross, Europe's most prolific serial killer of the 20th century.
A two-year-old girl is found wandering the streets of Philadelphia in the middle of the night by detectives Kevin Byrne and Jessica Balzano. She does not speak, but she may hold the key to solving a string of murders committed in and around Priory Park. As the detectives investigate, more bodies are found at Priory Park, and they're drawn closer and closer to the doors of Luther's devious maze and the dark secrets of Cold River.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Montanari's gripping seventh Kevin Byrne and Jessica Balzano mystery (after 2012's The Killing Room), the two Philadelphia detectives investigate the murder of Robert Freitag, whose past links him to the city's now-closed psychiatric hospital, Cold River, and to the asylum's most infamous figure, Dr. Godehard Kirsch. In Kirsch's macabre experiments with dream therapy, patients were implanted with the memories of an Estonian serial killer, Eduard Olev Kross, leading Balzano and Bryne to suspect that one of Kirsch's patients is now recreating Kross's murders. Meanwhile, Rachel Anne Gray, an ambitious real-estate agent, searches the catacombs of the city for her younger sister, who she believes was kidnapped by a "raggedy man" dozens of years ago. The atmosphere slides from the thrilling to the gothic in the final chapters, as Cold River offers up the last of its secrets. The abuses of the psychiatric care system that Montanari exposes are as chilling as the novel's violent crimes.
