"Prodigal Son" by Colleen McCullough, summary

The glamorous veneer of the university elite in the American town of Holloman conceals a series of cold-blooded murders using an exotic neurotoxin from the puffer fish. A police investigation exposes the underbelly of Connecticut academia, where scientific treatises conceal long-standing extortion, racial hatred, and decades-long marital exploitation. The intricate detective story draws on the author’s deep knowledge of neurobiology: the Australian author directed a neurophysiology lab at Yale University for over a decade. Written in 2012, it is the author’s fourth major detective story.

The novel is part of the author’s detective series about Captain Carmine Delmonico. It is the fourth of five works in this series. The series opened with "On. Off" (2006), continues with "Too Many Kills" (2009) and "Naked Cruelty" (2010), and concludes with "Carnal Sin" (2013).

The Tanballs’ Deadly Technique

On a January evening in 1969, wealthy timber merchant John Hall stepped into a mansion on Hampton Street. The man had been missing for three decades. Now, the thirty-two-year-old guest had arrived for the sixtieth birthday of his biological father, the influential book publisher Max Tunball.

The door was opened by young Davina.

The hostess turned out to be the elderly publisher’s second wife. The young stepmother immediately threw a raucous feast, pathetically proclaiming the return of the Gospel prodigal son. Gathered over the celebratory veal were the host’s relatives and close friends of the arriving guest: African-American biochemistry professor Jim Hunter and his socialite wife, Millicent. Nearby sat hematologist Dr. Al Markoff and his pregnant wife, Musa.

After dinner, the men retired to the dark red study to light cigars. John suddenly felt a stifling heat.

My lips went numb.

The unfortunate man’s fingers clutched the collar of his dress tuxedo, his windpipe was severely paralyzed, and his heartbeat rapidly faded before the eyes of the doctor and his bewildered relatives. The patient died eleven minutes later.

Theft of Poison and the Second Banquet

The tragedy was preceded by a strange incident.

The day before the guest’s death, researcher Millicent Hunter went to the office of her father, Chief County Medical Examiner Patrick O’Donnell. Her daughter excitedly reported the disappearance of six hundred milligrams of the deadly powder tetrodotoxin, stored in vacuum-sealed glass vials on the bottom shelf of her personal refrigerator in the university tower.

The alarmed pathologist turned to his cousin, experienced police captain Carmine Delmonico, for advice.

John Hall’s death instantly confirmed the detectives’ worst fears.

The laboratory toxin was put into use.

A day later, a lavish banquet in honor of the Chubb Press’s sesquicentennial was held in the historic Ivy Building, celebrating the retirement of the former dean, Don Carter. Leadership was being handed over to the Reverend Thomas Tarleton Tinkerman. The newly appointed dean despised progress, vehemently denounced science, and was determined to sabotage the imminent release of Jim Hunter’s popular science book, "The God of the Spiral," which had already been printed by the Tunballs without official permission.

In the middle of his speech, Dean Tinkerman clutched his throat.

The blue-faced priest fell onto the podium.

The paramedics who arrived found him in agony similar to John Hall’s. Chemical analysis revealed metabolites of pufferfish venom, and experts discovered a fresh needle mark on Tinkerman’s neck.

Investigators interviewed dozens of guests.

Soon, Sergeant Donnie Costello fished a suspicious-looking round disk with a short needle hidden under a rubber diaphragm out of a metal trash can. The device turned out to be pure decoy. There wasn’t a drop of poison inside the disk, and the mechanism itself served merely as a distraction for the cunning poisoner.

Meanwhile, Captain Delmonico coaxed the grief-stricken widow, Edith Tinkerman, into conversation. The battered woman confessed that she had personally given her husband an injection in the neck in the hallway outside the podium. Her husband constantly demanded vitamin B12 to boost his fading energy, taking an ampoule from his purse.

The criminal replaced the ampoule in advance.

The ruby hue lulled the poor woman’s vigilance.

Sculpting studio and garden massacre

Suspicion fell on the Hunters and the family that owned the printing house.

Delia Carstairs went to check the houses on the hill. In the outbuilding of Val Tunbull’s estate, the sergeant stumbled upon a disgusting sight: Emily Tunbull’s body, drowned in vomit, lay on the cement floor of the workshop. The woman had secretly dabbled in pottery, sculpting horse heads and sardonic portraits of her loved ones.

An unknown person poured tetrodotoxin crystals directly into a glass carafe of drinking water that was standing on a shelf.

Before her death, Emily blackmailed Davina.

Detectives soon uncovered a scandalous truth about the book publisher’s family. A visiting immigration official, Quinn Preston, revealed the past of Davina and her sister, Uda: refugees who had crossed the snowy Alps on foot, fleeing poverty. The girls arrived in New York illegally, falling into the clutches of blackmailer Chester Derzynski, Emily’s brother. The sisters were forced to extort money from wealthy elderly men. Davina later broke with her past, opened a design studio, and befriended the aging Max Tanball.

Sergeant Carstairs’s latest visit brought a stunning discovery. Lying in the mansion’s nursery was Alexis’s four-month-old heir, whose skin was distinctly tanned and whose eyes glowed a piercing green, just like Professor Jim Hunter’s.

Davina categorically denied cheating.

The woman referred to her distant African ancestors.

A search of the Tanballs’ home led the detectives to the attic of Uda’s mute servant. Lieutenant Abe Goldberg carefully opened the metal tubes of green gouache lying on the worktable and removed two vials of clear neurotoxin solution, along with a typed note from an unnamed benefactor.

Udu was arrested on charges of poisoning Emily Tunball.

Renowned attorney Anthony Behr volunteered to defend the defendant. The deft lawyer portrayed the cripple as a defenseless victim of circumstance, shifted the blame to the blackmailer Chester, who had fled to Florida, and secured a full acquittal within sixty minutes of the trial. Captain Delmonico realized that Emily had eliminated Davin using a gift from the true mastermind.

Payback in front of television cameras

Jim Hunter remained the investigators’ main target.

A hulking athlete with a Harvard bearing, Jim always carried himself with arrogance, considering everyone around him foolish. During interrogation, he mockingly told the detectives that any evidence against him would automatically fall on Millicent, whose pious family would not allow him to be disgraced.

There was a lack of evidence.

The Hunters traded their squalid rented apartment for a spacious mansion on Barker Street. Millie abandoned her laboratory experiments, bought expensive clothes on Fifth Avenue, and began furnishing the nursery in anticipation of motherhood.

The happiness did not last long.

In mid-March, a young woman began bleeding heavily. In the hospital room of a local clinic, Dr. Benjamin Solomon delivered a devastating verdict: her uterine cavity had been destroyed by numerous illegal abortions performed in her early teens, the fetus had died, and further attempts to conceive would inevitably lead to death from cancer. The doctor insisted on removing her reproductive organs.

Millie sank into an icy abyss of memories.

Since she was fifteen, she had given Jim all the grants she had earned, endured poverty, and mutilated her own body on the couches of street midwives for the sake of his dissertations. Now her husband openly admired Davina’s dark-skinned infant.

The second of April brought the denouement.

The city’s elite gathered in the luxurious Rare Book Museum for the presentation of the masterpiece "God of the Spiral." President Mackintosh delivered an inspired opening speech in front of three television networks.

Millicent stepped silently behind her smartly dressed husband.

There was a deafening roar.

The woman coldly pumped six bullets from an old revolver into Jim’s chest in front of hundreds of paralyzed guests. The man collapsed, dead. Captain Delmonico knocked the smoking weapon from the relative’s frozen fingers and took the killer into custody.

The next morning, in the holding cell, Millicent calmly revealed her dead husband’s monstrous secrets to investigators. Jim had long been on a path of serial murder: back at Columbia, the biochemist had beaten a picky professor to death, then eliminated two rivals in California, and poisoned John Hall to cover up past atrocities. Millicent herself wrote the bestseller "God of the Spiral" at a typewriter while her husband indulged in his own vanity. Reverend Tinkerman, who had uncovered the deception through stylistic analysis, then Hunter shot his unfortunate widow and stole the dangerous manuscript.

The last straw for the tormented woman was the birth of Davina’s illegitimate first child.

Lawyer Anthony Behr entered the prisoner’s cell. He offered his client a deal: he would win the case with a verdict of temporary insanity, proving the authorship of the book, and would take a percentage of the future millions in royalties.