Naked Cruelty (Carmine Delmonico #3) by Colleen McCullough

From Goodreads

Locking your door won't help. He's already inside... America in 1968 is in turmoil and the leafy Holloman suburb of Carew is being silently terrorised by a series of vicious and systematic rapes. When finally one victim finds the courage to speak out and go to the police, the rapist escalates to murder. For Captain Carmine Delmonico, it seems to be a case with no clues. And it comes as the Holloman Police Department is troubled: a lieutenant is out of his depth, a sergeant is out of control, and into this mix comes the beautiful, ruthlessly ambitious new trainee, Helen MacIntosh, daughter of the influential president of Chubb University. As the killer makes his plans, Carmine and his team must use every resource at their disposal - including a highly motivated neighbourhood watch, the Gentlemen Walkers...

My thoughts

This was a book that I borrowed from my local Library back in 2014!  I have had it sat in my house all that time and have just kept renewing the loan on it.  I hadn't realised that it had been here for that long and am absolutely flabbergasted.

This is the third in the Carmine Delmonico detective series.  I have previously read the first in the series which was called On, Off.

Please be aware that there are graphic passages of violence against others.  I mention this as it won't be to everyone's taste.  The passages are not gratuitous and are necessary in order to realise the lengths to which the perpetrator of the crime will go to.

This was a well written story that kept me engaged from beginning to end.  I did have my suspicions along the way, there were a few red herrings that made you think perhaps you had got it wrong, but in the end I was right.  I had to read the ending a couple of times, to make sure that I had understood it right and that I wasn't mistaken in what I was thinking, this sounds a little ambiguous.  If you read the story then you will possibly realise to what I am referring.

I look forward to reading more about Carmine Delmonico and his colleagues in the next books in the series.