Too Many Murders

October 26, 2009
Set in a Connecticut college town, bestseller McCullough's disappointing sequel to On, Off
(2006) starts off with an over-the-top premise and doesn't improve from there. In April 1967, a dozen murders occur in the normally quiet town of Holloman, Conn., in just 18 hours, culminating in the death by bear trap of Evan Pugh, a student at Chubb University with a penchant for blackmail. The disparate victims include a hooker, a college dean and the head of a major corporation; among the killing methods are four poisonings, three shootings and two pillow suffocations. In an unrealistic move, Capt. Carmine Delmonico of the Holloman police, who's in charge of the unwieldy investigation, sends his sergeants home for a good night's sleep while the crimes are still fresh. The solution may elicit unintended giggles as it papers over holes in logic rather than filling them.

December 1, 2009
Besieged by corpses, a Connecticut police department mobilizes in search of the mastermind behind a one-day killing spree.

Holloman, home of elite Chubb University, isn't big enough for its own homicide division. So when 12 bodies are brought to the morgue on April 3, 1967, Capt. Carmine Delmonico knows that his time with lovely English wife Desdemona and infant son Julian will be limited. Although the victims' demographics are all over the map, ranging from 71-year-old widow Beatrice Egmont, to John Kirkbride Denbigh, Dean at Chubb's Dante College, to prostitute Dee-Dee Hall, to Jimmy Cartwright, an 18-month old with Down syndrome, Carmine figures that so many murders all at once must be connected. While his sergeants Abe Goldberg and Corey Marshall look into the more prosaic deaths, Carmine focuses on the grisly slaying of Desmond Skeps, CEO of the local mega-conglomerate Cornucopia, who was injected with enough curare to inhibit movement, then tortured with a soldering iron. Cornucopia's board of well-tailored Chubb alums are on Carmine's radar, as is their legal eagle, Dr. Erica Davenport, who is also the latest love of Myron Mandelbaum, the second husband of Carmine's ex-wife. But Carmine's main focus is Ulysses, a shadowy traitor the FBI suspects of funneling defense secrets straight from Cornucopia to Russia.

You may need a scorecard to keep track of the perps and vics, but there's still room for a final twist as veteran McCullough (The Independence of Miss Mary Bennet, 2008, etc.) sends this frantic mega-mystery to its mostly foreseeable end.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

December 15, 2009
Carmine Delmonico, the homicide cop introduced in On, Off (2007), returns in this sequel. Its April 1967, and the college town of Holloman, Connecticut, is rocked by the murders of 12 of its citizens, all within the space of a single day. There appears to be no connection between the victims (who include an eight-month-old baby, a prostitute, and the head of a large corporation), but Carmine soon begins to wonder whether, somehow, the murders have something to do with an unknown individual, whom the FBI has code-named Ulysses, who is selling top-secret information to the Russians. Like On, Off, the novel is a contemporary-style procedural set in a pre-forensics era. The historical setting gives the novel a fresh feel, and it keeps readers off guard: if the story were set in the here and now, wed easily be able to anticipate the flow of the plot, but since it takes place in a time before DNA evidence, national computer databases, profiling, and so on, we have no idea how Carmine can possibly find a solution. A thoroughly entertaining crime novel.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)