Of course, Angela’s cases never go according to plan. No sooner does she start digging than a dead body turns up and someone tries to run her down on the street. Will Angela be able to uncover this credit card scam before she or anyone else gets hurt?

Deadbeat doesn’t offer much in the way of mystery. The solution doesn’t come as any big shock, and there aren’t any edge-of-your-seat plot twists. By the time the principle players had been introduced, the mystery was solved in my mind, but it was fun to read about Angela driving all over Boston trying to convince people to call the cops.

While I liked Angela, I didn’t find her much of a PI. She seems to have a way of stumbling onto suspects and clues by dumb luck alone. She bends the truth (and the law) when it suits her purposes, but immediately thinks everyone else should be John Q. Honest Citizen. She even tries to reason with the bad guys, expecting that they’ll turn themselves in. Hmmm, prison or living it up thanks to credit card fraud? Tough choice for the bad guys.

What Deadbeat does quite well is offer up some good characters outside of the mystery to further develop Angela’s life for the reader. She comes from a big Italian family, complete with dysfunction and skeletons in closets. These characters really flesh out who Angela is, adding better understanding to why she does what she does.

This is the third installment in the Angela Matelli series and she could be a nice addition to the literary ranks of female PIs. He ex-Marine status supplies her with the necessary kick-butt attitude and she proves, when she’s cornered, that she can be very resourceful. She just needs a good puzzling case to come along to prove it.

--Wendy Crutcher