This book made me laugh, especially during the love scenes. I doubt this was the author’s intention. Short, gnarled, gritty Italian cop meets posh British beanpole and they spend the first half of the book being crisply offhand, the last part sounding like canoodling dorks. Katie Hepburn and Spencer Tracey it isn’t – but it should be. Whenever they meet, I have an indelible image of the cop looking laconically at her belt buckle. He is Carmine; she, would you believe, is Desdemona.

Or is Colleen McCullough just having fun with us? She certainly claims to have enjoyed writing this, her first whodunit, but for the life of me I can’t think what is enjoyable about a succession of divinely beautiful, sepulchrally innocent sixteen-year-old girls having their vaginas ripped and scoured by fanged dildoes until they die. Serial killers are never nice: one needs good reason to spend a day or so reading about their hideous compulsions. McCullough says she loved ‘the chance to spill lots of blood in a book’.

The story is set in Connecticut, in 1965, long before DNA tests or other powerful CSI-type forensics could wrap up the quest in hours. Parts of a teenage girl are found in the fridge containing the remains of animals awaiting incineration. Normally, they would have been disposed of still concealed in their special bags, but this time someone has foolishly locked a monkey in the fridge. He goes berserk, shredding the bags and revealing the human parts, including the carefully plucked genitals.