In the prologue of McCullough’s disappointing fourth novel featuring Capt. Carmine Delmonico of the Holloman, Conn., police department (after 2010’s Naked Cruelty), John Hall, a long-lost heir recently arrived from Oregon, dies from a lethal injection of a stolen toxin at a black-tie family party held on the evening of January 3, 1969. Delmonico, who investigates Hall’s murder and two other grisly poisoning deaths, has a personal interest in the crime—his medical examiner cousin’s daughter was the keeper of the pilfered poison. Suspects include relatives who were slated to lose large amounts of money from Hall’s reappearance as well as ambitious faculty members from the town’s Chubb University. A far-fetched premise, lengthy passages of exposition, unconvincing characters and dialogue, and a lack of attention to accurate period detail will cause the reader to lose interest well before the end. Agent: Michael Carlisle, Inkwell Management. (Nov.)
"Colleen McCullough proves once again that she’s a master of fiction with a wide ranging imagination in this book."
"Just when it seems obvious who the murderer is, the evidence falls apart and it's back to square one. For those who enjoy drawing room stories, with many and varied characters, this will be an enjoyable read."
"In her enthusiastic style . . . McCullough delves into small town intrigue with well-defined characters and vivid descriptions. . . . Entertaining."
The novel is a rich, tightly-woven tapestry of colorful characters and intriguing plot . . . Stunning, surprising, culturally shocking, The Prodigal Son is traditional McCullough at her best.
"In her enthusiastic style . . . McCullough delves into small town intrigue with well-defined characters and vivid descriptions. . . . Entertaining."
"In her enthusiastic style . . . McCullough delves into small town intrigue with well-defined characters and vivid descriptions. . . . Entertaining."
“The novel is a rich, tightly-woven tapestry of colorful characters and intriguing plot . . . Stunning, surprising, culturally shocking, The Prodigal Son is traditional McCullough at her best.”
"Just when it seems obvious who the murderer is, the evidence falls apart and it's back to square one. For those who enjoy drawing room stories, with many and varied characters, this will be an enjoyable read."
"Colleen McCullough proves once again that she’s a master of fiction with a wide ranging imagination in this book."
When a lethal toxin extracted from the blowfish disappears from a Connecticut university laboratory in 1969, anxious biochemist Dr. Millie Hunter gets the news to Capt. Carmine Delmonico—but folks still drop dead at an important dinner party and then a gala event. Signs point to Millie's husband, Dr. Jim Hunter, a scientist who's making his name and a black man married to a white woman. Is he being framed? Fourth in a series that seems to be finding its bearings; McCullough worked as a neurology researcher at Yale in the late 1960s and early 1970s, so she's on comfortable ground here.
In 1969, the marriage between black Jim Hunter and his blonde wife, Millie, is met with unspoken ostracism, even in their circle of research scientists. An expert in lethal poisons, Millie announces that her groundbreaking blowfish toxin has disappeared from her closet-sized research lab, and then two murders rapidly occur in their small academic community. Narrator Lewis Hancock applies straightforward voices for Jim and Millie, and shines in his subtle characterization of Captain Carmine Delmonico, the police detective at the center of McCullough’s whodunit series. Hancock provides more colorful portrayals for a manipulative Yugoslavian trophy wife and a buttoned-up university president, both suspects in the murders. Even in academic circles, the lust for power can result in tragedy. N.M.C. © AudioFile 2013, Portland, Maine
Connecticut detective Carmine Delmonico (Naked Cruelty, 2010, etc.) is flummoxed by a string of murders that just might involve his biochemist cousin. While her prospective Nobel laureate husband Jim's been penning A Helical God, the book that could do for DNA what A Brief History of Time did for the cosmos, Chubb University professor Millie Hunter's a little worried. Since tetrodotoxin is really expensive to buy commercially, she's been extracting it herself from blowfish just in case she wants some for her lab. Now, someone seems to have pinched the deadly stuff from the unlocked refrigerator where she kept it. Millie tells her dad, medical examiner Patrick O'Donnell, to be on the lookout for anyone who might have been killed by the rare toxin, which paralyzes its victims within minutes of exposure. And sure enough, at a dinner party hosted by publishing mogul Max Tunbull and his Russian second wife, Davina, Jim and Millie's old friend John Hall, one of the few close friends of the interracial couple, keels over with all the classic tetrodotoxin symptoms. Since John is Max's long-lost son, suspicion initially centers on the Tunbulls. After all, Max's brother Ivan and nephew Val, not to mention the hysterically possessive Davina, mother of Max's infant son, would all stand to lose if John had wanted a share of Max's fortune. But the next to die is Chubb University Press' Head Scholar Thomas Tinkerman, a sanctimonious theologian looking to obstruct the publication of Jim's masterpiece. Now the Hunters are suspects, too. So when he's not dining on the delectables his wife, Desdemona, dishes up as she recovers from postpartum depression, Delmonico has the thankless task of investigating who may have pushed his cousin's research a step too far. The fourth entry in McCullough's cockamamie series takes the do-it-yourself spirit to new and distasteful extremes.
