Sins of the Flesh: A Carmine Delmonico Novel
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. --David Pitt