Sins of the Flesh

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

A Captain Carmine Delmonico mystery from the bestselling author of The Thorn Birds.

August 1969. Two anonymous male corpses are discovered in the sleepy college town of Holloman, Connecticut. After connecting the emaciated bodies to four other victims, the police realise that Holloman has a psychopathic killer on the loose.

Captain Carmine Delmonico's team begins to circle a trio of eccentrics who share family ties, painful memories, and a dark past. Things become even murkier when one of them turns out to be a friend of Sergeant Delia Carstairs. Delia has also recently befriended the head of the local mental hospital, who has been trying to rehabilitate a very difficult patient.

When another vicious murder rocks Holloman, Carmine realises that two killers are at large with completely different modus operandi. Suddenly the summer isn't so sleepy anymore. ..

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Summertime in a college town should be lazy, but 1969 is the exception in McCullough's Connecticut-set procedural series. It's bad enough contending with one serial killer, but Carmine fears a second murderer lurks. The fifth case for the police captain (after The Prodigal Son). [See Prepub Alert, 5/13/13.] (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

McCullough's fifth Capt. Carmine Delmonico novel (after 2012's The Prodigal Son) will be welcomed by readers who just love that creepy feeling. It starts with a man being starved to death as well as castrated-and he's not the only victim. Finding a psychopathic killer is a tough job for the police force of small-town Holloman, Conn., so the smart, if quirky, Delmonico returns early from vacation to lead his investigators, including Lt. Abe Goldberg and Sgt. Delia Carstairs. The story is set in 1969, though disappointingly, there's no real connection to that year's upheavals. However, fans should enjoy the precomputer, pre-cell phone police work. Rather than high-tech equipment, the investigation's crucial element proves to be Delia's friendship with two local women: one, the manager of a hip family-owned clothing business; the other, director of the local institution for the criminally insane. (And there's plenty of criminal insanity to go round.) Agent: Michael Carlisle, Inkwell Management. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Booklist Review

August 1969. A serial killer is operating in and around Holloman, a Connecticut college town, killing people in an especially slow and gruesome manner. Carmine Delmonico, the homicide cop who's featured in a handful of excellent crime thrillers (beginning with 2006's On, Off), is stymied. Suspects begin to emerge, but just as Carmine thinks he might be getting somewhere, something happens that takes him right back to square one. Of its many virtues (strong characters, realistic dialogue, smartly constructed stories), the Delmonico series' foremost selling point is its time and place: a small Connecticut town in the 1960s, well before modern-day, high-tech forensic investigative techniques existed. The book offers readers the chance to observe a murder investigation done the old-school way, without all the modern technological bells and whistles. Reading the book from our modern-day perspective, we think that if only Carmine could do this, or if only he had access to that, and that juxtaposition of contemporary crime-solving methods against the techniques of an earlier era proves to be a brilliant way of involving the reader in the story. A fine mystery.--Pitt, David Copyright 2010 Booklist

Kirkus Book Review

1969. Someone is kidnapping, castrating and starving beautiful young men to death in suburban Connecticut. And wait, there's more. If Capt. Carmine Delmonico, of the Holloman Police Department, doesn't catch this new killer soon, he threatens to eclipse the record set by whoever was behind the disappearance of the Shadow Women, half a dozen 30-ish ladies who vanished from Holloman at the circumspect rate of one a year between 1963 and 1968. Inspired by the studio photographs the Shadow Women left behind, Sgt. Delia Carstairs has been brooding over the case with nothing to show for her sleepless nights. But that all ends when Delia's friend, clothing-store manager Ivy Ramsbottom, takes her to a salon at Busquash Manor, the palatial home that Ivy's brother, designer Rha Tanais, nee Herbert Ramsbottom, shares with his partner, dancer Rufus Ingham, nee Antonio Carantonio IV. The stars are out at Busquash Manor, and Delia gets a snootful of actors, singers, producers and artists before she goes home. The real attraction, however, is the tangled back story of the Carantonio family, which features irregular liaisons, family feuds, disinheritances and yet more disappearances dating back to 1925. Meanwhile, back in the present, Delia and Ivy's friend Dr. Jessica Wainfleet, director of the Holloway Institute for the Criminally Insane, preens herself on her success in curing her aide, Walter Jenkins, of his homicidal tendencies even as McCullough (Naked Cruelty, 2010, etc.) provides growing evidence that Walter's cure may not be quite complete. If you want to find out how the mind-boggling, murderous plots are connected to each other, you'll just have to read the book, maybe two or three times to make sure.]]]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.