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Summary
Summary
In 1965, the dogged Lieutenant Carmine Delmonico is assigned to solve what appears to be a single murder. Part of a young woman's body has turned up at one of the world's leading neurological research centers, but it's not long before Delmonico realizes he's hunting a serial killer. All the center's members are hiding secrets Delmonico must unearth: what does Professor Robert Smith do in his basement? Why doesn't Dr. Walter Polonski's wife know about his cabin in the woods? As the murders mount, Delmonico joins with the center's tough female business manager to dig up the dirt on everyone.
Author Notes
Colleen McCullough was born on June 1, 1937 in Wellington, New South Wales, Australia. She attended Holy Cross College and the University of Sydney. She wanted to pursue a career in medicine but had an allergic reaction to the antiseptic soap that surgeons use to scrub. She decided to study neuroscience and established the department of neurophysiology at the Royal North Shore Hospital in Sydney before working as a researcher and teacher at Yale Medical School for ten years.
Her first novel, Tim, was published in 1974 and was adapted into a movie starring Mel Gibson. During her lifetime, she wrote 25 novels including The Thorn Birds, An Indecent Obsession, A Creed for the Third Millennium, The Ladies of Missalonghi, the Masters of Rome series, and Bittersweet. The Thorn Birds was adapted into a U.S. television mini-series in 1983, which won four Golden Globe awards. She died after a long illness on January 29, 2015 at the age of 77.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Australian McCullough (The Thorn Birds) portrays one of the creepiest serial killers in recent fiction in this intelligent shocker set in 1965 at an Ivy League university called Chubb located in Holloman, Conn. After an animal lab technician finds a partial corpse in the Hughlings Jackson Center for Neurological Research (aka "Hug"), police lieutenant Carmine Delmonico discovers that this murder is only one of many-with more to come-committed by a meticulous serial rapist/killer who saves the heads of his victims. The monster leaves so few clues that Delmonico calls him "the Ghost" and the newspapers "the Connecticut Monster." Despite the lack of fancy forensic tools, the determined detective discovers that the Ghost may be connected to a 1930s cold case. Adding heat to the investigation is the African-American community's outrage at the killer's preference for young women of mixed racial origins and Delmonico's growing romantic attachment to an endangered Hug employee. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Here's something new from the author of The Thorn Birds0 and numerous high-concept historical fiction titles: a straight-up detective thriller. It's 1965, and a dismembered body is found in a storage refrigerator at a neurological research center in Connecticut. Lieutenant Carmine Delmonico soon realizes he has got something new on his hands: a psychopath who kills for sport. In modern terms, a serial killer. McCullough, who admits to being a longtime reader of crime novels, is clearly well versed in the traditions of the genre: the novel features a working-class detective in an unfamiliar environment (sort of like Columbo) and a large cast of potential suspects (think Agatha Christie). The characters are vividly drawn, and the story itself is quite intriguing. A demon for research, McCullough packs the novel with enough information about the operation of the research center that we almost feel like we could run one. There are flaws: the prose is a bit overwritten, with phrases so out of place that they pull the reader up short ("stygian coldness," for example, on the very first page). Also, the overabundance of exclamation marks is sure to grate on many readers. But, despite these stylistic shortcomings, the novel should prove entertaining enough both to McCullough's many fans and to thriller readers who have never met a serial killer they didn't want to read more about. --David Pitt Copyright 2006 Booklist
School Library Journal Review
Veteran historical fiction writer McCullough (The Thorn Birds) tries her hand at the police procedural with mixed results. In 1965 Connecticut, at a thinly disguised Yale University research lab, the horrifying discovery of a young female's torso and limbs leads to the grim realization that a very clever and ritualistic serial killer--one who favors murdering innocent, adolescent girls of mixed-race backgrounds--is on the loose. Lt. Carmine Delmonico pits his team against the lab's eccentric researchers, all of whom initially radiate guilt. Once Delmonico wins the allegiance of the lab's business manager, Desdemona Dupre, the clues begin lining up. Clunky dialog and an overabundance of red herrings make this closed-room drama drag at first, but McCullough's storytelling strengths take over as she weaves all sorts of odd psychological elements together and leaves the door open to sequels. There's nothing cozy about this whodunit; it's a direct tribute to the late crime fiction writer Ngaio Marsh. Recommended for readers of British procedurals and dedicated serial killer genre fans. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 2/15/06.]-- Teresa L. Jacobsen, Solano Cty. Lib., Fairfield, CA
Kirkus Review
Serial killer terrorizes Connecticut in veteran author McCullough's debut thriller. Set in 1965-66 in Holloman (i.e., New Haven), where racial tensions are beginning to roil, the action ignites from the chance discovery of a dismembered, racially mixed female corpse in a refrigerator used for storing incinerator-bound dead animals. The defunct critters were subjects of neurological studies conducted at the Hughlings Jackson Center, nicknamed the Hug. Lieutenant Carmine Delmonico quarantines the Hug and interrogates its staff, "the Huggers," including the statuesque jolie-laide Desdemona Dupre. Meanwhile, Wesley le Clerc, a Hugger nephew, exploits the gruesome find to help his mentor, Mohammed el Nesr, foment racial unrest. The investigation drags on in real-time tedium because Ivy League politics must be needlessly explicated and the POVs of far too many potential culprits (not a few conveniently equipped with private lairs) superficially mined. Since '63, Carmine learns, several teenaged girls with caf-au-lait complexions and sheltered upbringings have disappeared. These bodies presumably went up in smoke in the animal incinerator. As bimonthly abductions occur, all Connecticut is on high alert against the so-called Monster, dubbed the Ghost by cops. A 16-year-old is taken from a supposedly locked-down high school and two other girls vanish, now in monthly succession, despite massive surveillance of all Hugger homes and haunts. The killer has gone against type with a darker-skinned black and a white Lebanese victim, each found headless, and dressed in child's beaded frocks, which Carmine finds were purchased with 1933-issue $100 bills. Forensic examinations reveal that all the victims were sadistically raped, but trace evidence is non-existent in these pre-DNA-testing days. Tipped off to some sinister family skeletons, Carmine identifies the common link all the victims share. After a successful police sting, Wesley le Clerc pulls a Jack Ruby on the prime suspect. Cheated of justice, Carmine settles down to married life with Desdemona, satisfied at least that he has banished the Ghost. Or has he? McCullough (The Touch, 2003, etc.) has achieved a passably engrossing police procedural. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
(See Prepub Alert, LJ 2/15/06) (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
From Chapter 1 Wednesday, October 6th, 1965 Jimmy woke up gradually, conscious at first of only one thing: the perishing cold. His teeth were chattering, his flesh ached, his fingers and toes were numb. And why couldn't he see? Why couldn't he see? All around him was pitch darkness, a blackness so dense he had never known anything like it. As he grew wider awake he realized too that he was imprisoned in something close, smelly, alien. Wrapped up! Panic set in and he began to scream, to claw frantically at whatever was confining him. It ripped and tore, but when the stygian coldness persisted after he managed to free himself, his terror drove him mad. There were other things all around him, the same smelly kind of restraints, but no matter how he shrieked, ripped, tore, he couldn't find a way out, couldn't see a particle of light or feel a puff of warmth. So he shrieked, ripped, tore, his heart roaring in his ears and the only noises his own. Otis Green and Cecil Potter came into work together, having hooked up on Eleventh Street with a broad grin for each other. Dead on 7 A.M. , but wasn't it great not to have to punch a time clock? Their place of work was civilized, man, no arguments there. They put their lunch pails in the small stainless steel cupboard they had reserved for their own use -- no need for locks, there were no thieves here. Then they started the business of their day. Cecil could hear his babies calling for him; he went straight to their door and opened it, speaking to them in a tender voice. "Hi, guys! How ya doin' huh? Everybody sleep well?" The door was still hissing shut behind Cecil when Otis saw to the least palatable job of his day, emptying the refrigerator. His wheeled plastic bin smelled clean and fresh; he put a new liner in it and pushed it over to the refrigerator door, a heavy steel one with a snap-lock handle. What happened next was a blur: something streaking past him as he opened the door, screaming like a banshee. "Cecil, get out here!" he yelled. "Jimmy's still alive, we gotta catch him!" The big monkey was in a state of gibbering frenzy, but after Cecil talked to him a little while and then held out his arms, Jimmy bolted into them, shivering, his shrieks dying to whimpers. "Jesus, Otis," Cecil said, cradling the beast like a father his child, "how did Dr. Chandra miss that? The poor little guy's been locked in the fridge all night. There there, Jimmy, there there! Daddy's here, little man, you're okay now!" Both men were shocked and Otis's heart had a jelly roll beat to it, but no real harm was done. Dr. Chandra would be pleased as punch that Jimmy hadn't died after all, thought Otis, returning to the refrigerator. Jimmy was worth a hundred big ones. Even a cleanliness fanatic like Otis couldn't banish the smell of death from the refrigerator, scrub it with disinfectant and deodorant though he did. The stench, not of decay but of something subtler, surrounded Otis as he flipped the light switch to reveal the chamber's stainless steel interior. Oh, man, Jimmy had made a regular mess of it! Torn paper bags were strewn everywhere, headless rat carcasses, stiff white hair, obscenely naked tails. And, behind the dozen rat bags, a couple of much bigger bags, torn up too. Sighing, Otis went to fetch more bags from a cupboard and began to make order out of Jimmy's chaos. The dead rats properly bagged again, he reached into the chilly chamber and pulled the first of the two big bags forward. It had been rent from top to bottom, most of its contents on full display. Otis opened his mouth and screamed as shrilly as Jimmy, was still screaming when Cecil erupted out of the monkey room. Then, not seeming to notice Cecil, he turned and ran out of animal care, down the halls, into the foyer, out the entrance, legs opening and closing in a punishing run down Eleventh Street to his home on the second floor of a shabby three-family house. Celeste Green was having coffee with her nephew when Otis burst into the kitchen; they leaped to their feet, Wesley's passionate diatribe about Whitey's crimes forgotten. Celeste went for the smelling salts while Wesley put Otis on a chair. Back with the bottle, she pushed Wesley roughly out of her way. "You know your trouble, Wes? You always in the way! You didn't get in Otis's way all the time, he wouldn't call you a good for nothin' kid! Otis! Otis, honey, wake up!" Otis's skin had faded from a warm deep brown to a pasty grey that didn't improve when the ammoniac vapors were jammed under his nose, but he came around, jerked his head away. "What is it? What's the matter?" Wesley was asking. "A piece of woman," Otis whispered. "A what?" sharply from Celeste. "A piece of woman. In the fridge at work with the dead rats. A pussy and a belly." He began to shake. Wesley asked the only question that mattered to him. "Was she a white woman or a black woman?" "Don't bother him with that, Wes!" Celeste cried. "Not black," Otis said, hands going to his chest. "But not white neither. Colored," he added, slipped forward off the chair and fell to the floor. "Call an ambulance! Go on, Wes, call an ambulance! " Which came very quickly, due to two fortunate facts: one, that the Holloman Hospital was just around the corner, and the other, that business was slack this hour of morning. Still very much alive, Otis Green was put into the ambulance with his wife crouched beside him; the apartment was left to Wesley le Clerc. He didn't linger there, not with news like this. Mohammed el Nesr lived at 18 Fifteenth Street, and he had to be told. A piece of woman! Not black, but not white either. Colored. That meant black to Wesley, as it did to all the members of Mohammed's Black Brigade. Time that Whitey was called to account for two hundred years and more of oppression, of treating black people as second-rate citizens, even as beasts without immortal souls. When he'd gotten out of prison in Louisiana he'd decided to come north to Tante Celeste in Connecticut. He yearned to make a reputation as a black man who mattered, and that was easier to do in a part of the nation less prone than Louisiana to throw blacks in jail if they looked sideways. Connecticut was where Mohammed el Nesr and his Black Brigade hung out. Mohammed was educated, had a doctorate in law -- he knew his rights! But for reasons that Wesley saw every day when he looked in a mirror, Mohammed el Nesr had dismissed Wesley as worthless. A plantation black, a nobody nothing. Which hadn't dampened Wesley's ardor; he intended to prove himself in Holloman, Connecticut! So much so that one day Mohammed would look up to him , Wesley le Clerc, plantation black. Cecil Potter had soon discovered what sent Otis screeching out of animal care, but he wasn't a panicky man. He did not touch the contents of the refrigerator. Nor did he call the cops. He picked up the phone and dialed the Prof's extension, knowing full well that the Prof would be in his office, even at this hour. His only peace happened early in the mornings, he always said. But not, thought Cecil, this morning. "It's a sad case," said Lieutenant Carmine Delmonico to his uniformed colleague and nominal superior, Captain Danny Marciano. "With no other relatives we can find, the kids will have to go into the system." "You're sure he did it?" "Positive. The poor guy tried to make it look like some stranger busted in, but there's his wife and her lover in the bed and her lover's cut up some but she's mincemeat -- he did it. My bet is that he'll confess later today voluntarily." Marciano rose to his feet. "Then let's get some breakfast." His phone rang; Marciano wriggled his brows at Carmine and picked up. Within three seconds the police captain had stiffened, lost all contentment. He mouthed "Silvestri!" at Carmine and commenced a series of nods. "Sure, John. I'll start Carmine now and get Patsy there as soon as I can." "Trouble?" "Big trouble. Silvestri's just had a call from the head of the Hug -- Professor Robert Smith. They've found part of a female body in their dead animal refrigerator." "Christ!" Sergeants Corey Marshall and Abe Goldberg were breakfasting at Malvolio's, the diner the cops used because it was next door to headquarters in the County Services building on Cedar Street. Carmine didn't bother walking in; he rapped his knuckles on the glass in front of the booth where Abe and Corey were washing down hotcakes and maple syrup with big mugs of coffee. Lucky stiffs, he thought. They get to eat, I get to give my report to Danny, now I don't get to eat. Seniority's a pain in the ass. The car Carmine regarded as his own (it was really a Holloman Police Department unmarked) was a Ford Fairlane with a souped-up V-8 engine and cop springs and shocks. If the three of them were in it, Abe always drove, Corey rode shotgun, and Carmine spread himself and his papers in the back. Telling Corey and Abe took half a minute, the trip from Cedar Street to the Hug less than five. Holloman lay about halfway up the Connecticut coast, its spacious harbor looking across the Sound to Long Island. Founded by dissenting Puritans in 1632, it had always prospered, and not only because of the numerous factories that lay on its outskirts as well as up the Pequot River. A good proportion of its 150,000 people were connected in some way to Chubb University, an Ivy League institution that admitted itself inferior to none, even Harvard and Princeton. Town and Gown were inextricably intertwined. Chubb's main campus lay around three sides of the big Green, its early colonial Georgian and nineteenth-century gothic buildings joined by some startlingly modern edifices tolerated only because of the august architectural names associated with each; but there was also Science Hill to the east, where the science campus was located in square towers of dark brick and plate glass, and, way across town to the west, the Chubb Medical School. Because medical schools grew up alongside hospitals, by 1965 they tended to be situated in the worst part of any city; in this respect Holloman was no different. The Chubb Medical School and the Holloman Hospital straggled down Oak Street on the southern border of the larger of Holloman's two black ghettoes, called the Hollow because it lay in a hollow that had once been a swamp. To compound the health care woes, in 1960 the oil reservoirs of East Holloman were relocated at the end of Oak Street on waste ground between I-95 and the harbor. The Hughlings Jackson Center for Neurological Research sat on Oak Street right opposite the Shane-Driver medical student apartments, 100 for 100 students. Next to the Shane-Driver was the Parkinson Pavilion for medical research. It faced the Hug's neighbor, the Holloman Hospital, a twelve-storey pile that had been rebuilt in 1950, the same year that saw the Hug go up. "Why do they call it the Hug?" Corey asked as the Ford swung into the temporary road that bisected a gigantic parking lot. "First three letters of Hughlings, I guess," said Carmine. " Hug? It's got no dignity. Why not the first four letters? Then it'd be the Hugh." "Ask Professor Smith," said Carmine, eyeing their destination. The Hug was a shorter, smaller twin of the Burke Biology Tower and the Susskind Science Tower cross-campus on Science Hill; a baldly square, squat pile of dark brick with plenty of big plate-glass windows. It sat in three acres of what had used to be slum dwellings, demolished to make way for this monument perpetuating the name of a mystery man who had had absolutely nothing to do with its genesis. Who on earth was this Hughlings Jackson? A question all of Holloman asked. By rights the Hug should have been named after its donor, the enormously wealthy, late Mr. William Parson. Having no gate key to the parking lot, Abe put the Ford on Oak Street right outside the building. Which had no entrance onto Oak Street; the three men tramped down a gravel path along the north side to a single glass door, where a very tall woman was waiting for them. It's like a child's building block in the middle of a huge room, Carmine thought; three acres is a lot of land for something only a hundred feet per side. And shit, she's holding a clipboard. Office, not medical. His mind automatically registered the physical details of every person who swam into his piece of the human sea, so it was busy as she drew closer: six-three in bare feet, early thirties, navy pant suit on the baggy side, flat lace-up shoes, mouse-brown hair, a face with a biggish nose and a prominent chin. She'd never have made Miss Holloman ten years ago, let alone Miss Connecticut. Once he halted in front of her, however, he noted that she had very fine, interesting eyes the color of thick ice, which he had always found beautiful. "Sergeants Marshall and Goldberg. I'm Lieutenant Carmine Delmonico," he said curtly. "Desdemona Dupre, the business manager," she said as she took them into a tiny foyer, apparently only there to accommodate two elevators. But instead of pressing the UP button, she opened a door in the opposite wall and led them into a wide corridor. "This is our first floor, which contains the animal care facilities and the workshops," she said, her accent placing her as someone from the other side of the Atlantic. Turning a corner put them in another hall. She pointed to a pair of doors farther down. "There you are, animal care." "Thanks," said Carmine. "We'll take it from here. Please wait for me back at the elevators." Her brows rose, but she turned on her heel and disappeared without comment. Carmine found himself inside a very large room lined with cupboards and bins. Tall racks of clean cages big enough to take a cat or dog stood in neat rows in an area fronting a service elevator many times the size of the two in the foyer. Other racks held plastic boxes topped with wire grids. The room smelled good, pungent like a pine forest, with only the faintest hint of something less pleasant below it. Cecil Potter was a fine-looking man, tall, slender, very well kept in his pressed white boiler suit and canvas bootees. His eyes, Carmine fancied, smiled a lot, though they were not smiling now. One of Carmine's most important policies in this year of busing turmoil was that the black people he met in the course of his job or social life be treated courteously; he held out his hand, shook Cecil's firmly, performed the introductions without barking them or looking rushed. Corey and Abe were his men through thick and thin, they followed suit with the same courtesy. "It's here," said Cecil, moving to a closed stainless steel door with a snap-lock handle. "I didn't touch a thing, just shut the door." He hesitated, decided to risk it. "Uh, Lieutenant, do you mind if I get back to my babies?" "Babies?" "The monkeys. Macaques. Rhesus mean anything to you? Well, that's them. They in there, an' very upset. Jimmy won't lay off telling them where he been, an' they very upset." "Jimmy?" "The monkey Dr. Chandra thought was dead, an' put in a bag in the fridge last night. Jimmy really found her -- tore the place apart when he woke up in the dark freezing his buns off. When Otis -- he my assistant as well as the handyman -- went to empty the fridge, Jimmy came outta there screeching and yelling. Then Otis found her , an' he was outta here screeching worse than Jimmy. I looked, an' called the Prof. I guess the Prof called you." "Where's Otis now?" Carmine asked. "Knowing Otis, he run home to Celeste. She his mama as well as his wife." They were gloved now; Abe wheeled the bin away from the door and Carmine opened it as Cecil, already crooning and clucking, went into the monkey room. Of the two big bags, one still lay at the back of the chamber. The other, rent from where the top folded over clear to the bottom, had exposed the lower half of a female torso. When Carmine noted its size and its lack of pubic hair his heart sank -- a prepubescent child? Oh, please, not that! He made no movement to touch a thing, just leaned his shoulders against the wall. "We wait for Patrick," he said. "I never smelled a smell like it -- dead, but not decomposing," said Abe, dying for a cigarette. "Abe, go find Mrs. Dupre and tell her she can go upstairs as soon as the uniforms arrive," Carmine said, knowing that expression well. "Post them on all the entrances and emergency exits." Then, alone with Corey, he rolled his eyes. "Why in there?" he asked. Copyright ©2006 by Colleen McCullough Excerpted from On, Off by Colleen McCullough All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.