The Stolen Ones

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. (Feb.)