He Who Dies
An Angela Matelli Mystery
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Ex-Marine turned private investigator Angela Matelli comes from a large family that have moved away from their original East Boston home. While Angela and her siblings have all chosen different lifestyles and professions, there is one inviolable rule that remains in all their lives - everyone goes to their Mother's house for Sunday dinner. So when Angela's brother Albert missed twice in a row, Mrs. Matelli is certain that something bad has happened to her son.
Albert, widely believed by the family to be hooked up with the local mob, has always been scrupulous about Sunday dinner and now Mrs. Matelli wants to hire her daughter Angela to look into his disappearance. Against her better judgment, Angela - using her mother's key - breaks into Albert's apartment to find the dinner table set, an open bottle of wine, and a three-day old corpse in other room.
The corpse, luckily, isn't Albert but Angela suspects someone is using the body to try and set her brother up. As she digs further into her brother's life she quickly discovers that his boss in the mob claims to nothing about Albert's troubles, the police are after him to explain the corpse in his apartment, and his partners in the Itty-Bitty Kitty toy factory are desperate for his return. Now it's up to Angela to uncover what each of these things has to do with the others - and who is trying so desperately to get to her brother - before it is too late.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Despite its bland title, Lee's latest offering in the Angela Matelli series (Deadbeat; Missing Eden; etc.) is a sharp, stylish mystery with a touch of humor. Boston PI Matelli is on a personal mission after her younger brother, Albert, who's a mob associate in Rhode Island, turns up missing. Encumbered by the insistent presence of their good Italian mama, Matelli begins a quest that turns ugly when a body is discovered in Albert's ritzy condo. Albert, a front man for the Providence Mafia, runs a legit company that manufactures the latest toy craze, the Itty Bitty Kitty. In the course of investigating the company's management, Angela meets Don Giovanni Testa, Providence mob boss, who just happens to be an old flame of her mother's. While poking fun at old-fashioned Mafia movies and nicknames, such as Johnny Smash and Nick the Knife, Lee turns dead serious when Angela begins to receive threatening messages, and someone leaves a human finger as a grisly warning in her car. Lee's prose is tight and flows at whirlwind speed, while the Italian family members, the Matellis as well as Don Testa, fill their roles admirably. The concluding confrontation, in which Angela puts her martial arts knowledge to good use, may come as no surprise, but getting there is one entertaining ride.
