{review} too many murders

Colleen McCullough Too Many Murders (2009)

Well, the title sums it up. There are, I think, indeed too many murders in this book. The result is a sort of very smart form of chaos, but still chaos. I really enjoyed McCullough's first book in the Carmine Delmonico series - On, Off (2006) - and I was looking forward to this one. It isn't a bad read, but it is terribly overcomplicated by the task which the author has set herself, and it all seems a little bit forced. Beyond the interesting plot per se - twelve very different murders on one day in a small Connecticut university city in 1967 - we also have crammed in here: a handful of Russian agents; an oddball FBI spy-catcher; Carmine's giantess wife; the lack of anyone with a normal Christian name (when did you last meet a Philomena and a Desdemona together?); a lot of extraneous material taking up space (all interesting, but still space-filling); that old stereotype of the killer gunning for the detective's loved ones; and some of the most wooden dialogue I've encountered. No one talks like this. Surely. Not even in New England. Even the prose is stilted: "Privately he thought she looked stunning in an ice-blue gown she had embroidered herself in the manner of a dress Audrey Hepburn had worn in a film called Sabrina."

There is just too much going on here. And, yet, it still has elements - the concept, for example - which make is an OK story, but this may be the years of writing experience brought to it by the author. Disappointing. 

Rating: 6/10.

If you liked this... well, there's another one out now if you're game: Naked Cruelty (2010).