Customer Reviews

Too Many Murders: A Carmine Delmonico Novel (Carmine Delmonico Novels)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Holloman, Connecticut is rarely beset with hard crime cases in 1967, but April 3rd changes this small city forever. Twelve seemingly unrelated murders occur on that fateful day. Chief of detectives Carmine Delmonico and his unit are swimming in crime scene evidence, lengthy survivor interview files, and few if any suspects. The mayor and the media are clamoring for solutions to these gruesome deaths.

Carmine is tough but suave, and his Italian background and longtime residence in the community have garnered him respect in his hometown. He's taken aback by the diversity of the crimes that have just occurred. A large rusty bear trap has clamped the life from a college student at the local Chubb University. A young mother's life has been snuffed in her own home. A college administrator has been poisoned by the tea he drank while conferencing with students. A professor's wife has inadvertently served her husband poisoned juice for breakfast. The wealthy CEO of Holloman's largest employer, Cornucopia, has been sexually brutalized, drugged and killed. Puzzling yet is the rape and murder of a well-known black prostitute.

Carmine's staff is stressed by the workload. Two of his detectives are in line for a promotion, and each would benefit from a rapid closure to these cases. His right-hand assistant, Delia Carstairs, is the overqualified but enthusiastic niece of the local police commissioner.

Colleen McCullough's long list of successful books began with her family saga, THE THORN BIRDS, and continues with a biography and crime novels that showcase her outstanding writing talents. Her characters become reality on the page. Carmine is portrayed as a handsome, fairly tall man with Mediterranean features whose family background strengthens his personality. His wife, Desdemona, in contrast, stands more than six-feet tall with large hands and feet, and is English by birth. She plays a part in Carmine's case problems when the mysterious perpetrator launches an attack on their family.

McCullough skillfully introduces secondary characters important to the story. The detectives split interview responsibilities for the surviving spouses and family members. The murder of Desmond Skeps, Cornucopia's CEO, presents a series of difficult questions to answer. The company has been the subject of an FBI investigation because highly secret plans have been leaked to the Russians for nearly 10 years, and someone in the company has been the source of that leak. At this point, McCullough brings in FBI special agent Ted Kelly to stick as a thorn in Carmine's side. Banter between the two law enforcement officers is congenial but deadly serious when territories are overstepped. Evidence gathered by both agencies is closely guarded and begrudgingly shared.

To complicate matters further for Carmine, his ex-wife's soon-to-be-ex-husband arrives in town with a startling announcement. Myron, a successful movie mogul, has fallen for a new love, Erica Davenport, executive officer at Cornucopia and former close friend of the murdered CEO. Myron is infatuated and plans a gala to announce their engagement. Carmine is duly unimpressed. His reservations about Erica stem from his detective's nose for the extraordinary. She strikes him as too cold and business-minded to marry his gentlemanly friend.

Carmine's investigation hits bumps and wrong turns, but his gut tells him that 12 murders in one day must be connected, although common sense steers otherwise. With the FBI hanging on his coattails, he leans toward the possibility that one monster engineered or committed all the slayings. Espionage at Cornucopia is the FBI's aim, while Carmine's commitment is to solve the murders.

Colleen McCullough has written a suspenseful crime story in TOO MANY MURDERS, a sequel to ON, OFF. The reader turns each page with promise of new information on the next. Her characters seem real, with traits relevant to the time period chosen. Even at the end of the novel, the crimes are solved but she leaves us with a faint hint that closure is not final. I look forward to reading more books from this talented author.

--- Reviewed by Judy Gigstad

One day, one town, twelve murders. And you thought that Pearl Harbor was the "Day that Will Live in Infamy".

The unusual conglomeration of victims include a child suffering from Downs Syndrome, a prostitute, a pre-med student, the wealthy CEO of a major R&D company, a college dean, a little old lady, three black caterers, etc. All have been dispatched by a range of methods ranging from poison and gunshot to drowning and strangulation to death by bear trap. Are these all singular, unrelated incidents or are they each just one piece of a larger more sinister plan hatched by one cunning mind? Set in 1967, long before the advent of many of the forensic tests we currently take for granted came into being, Police Captain Carmine Delmonico and his crack investigative team of Corey Marshall, Abe Goldberg and Delia Carstairs find themselves facing the huge challenge of connecting the dots to solve the murders. Complicating their investigation even further is the appearance of an FBI agent who reveals that one of the twelve victims is the head a company that works on secret government projects involving the development of defensive weapons and has been infiltrated by an agent of the USSR who has managed compromise company security and appropriate valuable information. (Are we all old enough to remember the Cold War??).

The investigation proceeds with the plot becoming more and more thought provoking and convoluted. Who is the killer? Is there more than one? Are the murders and the security breach connected? Is the spy also the killer? There are a plethora of questions to be answered and suspects from which to choose and the reader is invited to join the investigative team and see if they can arrive at the answer before the police do. Although the storyline is truly impracticable it is, nevertheless, an entertaining diversion guaranteed to keep you reading. 3 1/2 STARS

I think what I like best about this series of books is that it is set back in time, in the mid 1960s, an unusual time frame to set murder mysteries. Most of the books about this era are about the Vietnam War, the anti-war movement and so forth. These novels involve older people in a CT town which houses a prominent college. The main characters are all about 40 years of age. This is the second book in the series. I don't like it as much as the first but it is still very good. What the author chooses to deal with, at the heart of the 12 murders occurring in one day, is that there is a KGB spy operating within a major corporation in the town. Even worse, the corporation is mainly a defense contractor. The author does many clever things in this novel. I did solve it but not until the very end.

Russian spies? the cold war? 1967? Are you kidding me? There is lip service given to feminism and even less to racial tensions. There is no mention of Vietnam. This book is a mere shell of a story. The plot is full of holes, the police make huge assumptions, the characters are shallow. The spy is sloppy. The FBI has loose lips, supposedly in the era of J Edgar Hoover. The small town cops have top security level clearance. This book was poorly researched and poorly written. The author resorted to trying to pull loose ends together in the end by narrating the reading of the culprit's diary for several pages. I was hugely disappointed in Colleen McCullough, who wrote so wonderfully in The Thornbirds. She should never have tried a mystery. I certainly won't read another.

Utterly unconvincing. I felt hard-pressed to keep track of so many characters, particuarly when most were both improbable and poorly drawn. Only the compellingly intelligent and very human Carmine Delmonico, his magnificent spouse, Desdemona, and Carmine's brilliant assistant, Delia, kept me going until the end. The dialogue often used jarring locutions that would never have been used by the American characters presented, and often featured bizarre synaptic leaps which I found increasingly maddening. Finally, although Cold War intrigue mandated the late 1960s setting, virtually no sense of American culture in 1967 comes across, save the mention of Carmine's trusty Ford Fairlane. All told, a disappointment.

Murder, international conspiracy, and sex drive this story. MuCullough creates the intrigue needed to makes this murder mystery a tough case to solve. The conflict between the FBI and the local police force adds to the dilemma of finding suspects and clues. Getting hooked on the story is easy. Putting it aside for later reading is not so easy.

Nineteen years old college student Evan Pugh blackmailed "Motor Mouth" who gave him one hundred thousand dollars. As he reaches for his stash in his college room walk-in closet, he moves into a bear trap, which makes him bleed out. When the police arrive, they are stunned by the scene especially the ingenious trap and shocked as this the twelfth death on April 3, 1967.

Police Captain Carmine Delmonico realizes that the mass murders are related somehow because Holloman, Connecticut doesn't have that many murders in a year. As he and her cohorts investigate the homicides, they are able to separate some from the sinister genius who bolted down the bear trap. However, the puppet-master used locals to act as his or her perp murdering the victims. To further complicate an already convoluted murder mystery, one of the dead victims Desmond Skeps was a CEO and majority stockholder of Cornucopia where someone was selling secrets to the Russians that had him on FBI surveillance. Delmonico is uninterested in foreign espionage as he has a killer to catch, but each clue returns him and his unit back to Cornucopia.

This police procedural sequel to On, Off affirms how super of a novelist Colleen McCullough is as her mysteries are as good as her historical fictions (see The Thorn Birds). Each murder is solved one at a time in a way that will remind readers of Christie's And Then There Were None although all occurs in the midst of a crowded college town. Delmonico is a multi-faceted protagonist who is a terrific police detective and a wonderful family man. Readers will enjoy working the cases with him and his sidekicks especially when his wife and daughter are threatened.

Harriet Klausner

The premise of this book was intriguing - no need to elaborate it on that, the other reviews cover that. What was so annoying to me was that the book is written in such a British style, with British styles of dialogue, that I kept having to remind myself it was supposed to be set in Connecticut. It was also totally dialogue oriented, rather than action oriented, another British approach for mysteries. There were so many characters with so little development that I couldn't keep any of them straight. Even at the end of the book, there were people referred to that I had no idea who they were.

I typically don't enjoy British mysteries because of the dialogue styles, and this one was no exception. It took me forever to read because I fell asleep each night after reading only 2-3 pages. If you love British mysteries, then you might love this book. The characters are all black/white - the hero and his family are too good to be real, and the bad guys are all bad. Not much depth on either.

I gave it two stars because I feel like the plot has potential, if unrealized.

This book was a struggle to read as far as I did (about half-way). I think Ms McCollough must talk to herself an awful lot on Norfolk Island. Her conversations in this book border on the hilarious. Try working into your conversation "the effluxion of time" or an "agnate relative." Typcal fare in this book. I finally gave up following the fight scene between the police captain and the FBI agent. After two punches were thrown (and the 6' captain bests the ~6'8" feebie with one blow), they retired back to the dining room to finish their lunch together. Oh, give me a break! I loved the Thorn Birds movie and thought this might also be a great book. But, please skip it and go read better thrillers elsewhere...by anybody.

McCullough, the author of The Thorn Birds, successfully mixes historical fiction, (1960's Connecticut) with the basic rules of a whodunit mystery where a dozen separate murders are committed on the same date. One of her best books yet