Carmine Delmonico Books in Order

The Carmine Delmonico novels are crime stories set in the fictional city of Holloman, Connecticut, through the second half of the 1960s. At the center is Carmine Delmonico, an Italian American homicide cop who relies on patient legwork, early forensic tools, and a small team of trusted detectives rather than computers or DNA.

Holloman is a compact world with outsized problems. A prestigious university, Chubb, anchors the town, along with advanced research labs and a powerful arms manufacturer, so campus politics, Cold War secrets, and boardroom rivalries all bleed into Carmine's caseload.

In On, Off a mutilated body turns up inside a private neurology institute known as the Hug. As Carmine digs into the eccentric scientists and staff who work there, he realizes he may be dealing with a serial killer who has been operating quietly for years and understands anatomy far too well. The case pulls him into a partnership, and then a marriage, with brilliant administrator Desdemona Dupre.

Too Many Murders jumps to 1967, when twelve people are killed in Holloman in a single day, each in a different way. Carmine has to decide whether he is facing one mastermind or several unrelated killers, all while a spy code named Ulysses leaks weapons secrets from local company Cornucopia, tying small town murder to global tension.

In Naked Cruelty the focus shifts to a leafy suburb that is being stalked by a meticulous rapist who escalates to murder once a victim goes to the police. The department is under pressure, a new trainee from a powerful family arrives with her own agenda, and Carmine must thread his way through office politics as carefully as through the crime scenes.

The Prodigal Son returns to Chubb University, where a deadly blowfish based neurotoxin disappears from a biochemistry lab just before a string of sudden deaths. Suspicion falls on a gifted young scientist who already feels like an outsider, and Carmine has to decide whether he is hunting a poisoner or unraveling a frame up.

In Sins of the Flesh emaciated male bodies begin to surface around town while Carmine is meant to be on holiday. The investigation points toward a knot of damaged families, a psychiatric hospital, and eventually the possibility that two different killers are working at once, each with their own pattern.

Across the series you see Carmine at home as well as at work, juggling a close Italian extended family, a strong willed wife, and changing social attitudes. The books are talky, full of office banter and community detail, and they lean into the feel of pre digital policing, where instinct, interviews, and careful autopsies carry as much weight as any lab test. Starting with On, Off lets you watch his world and his squad grow in complexity with each case.