A Marco Fontana Mystery Book 1

When author Helmut Brandt is killed in an apparent mugging, P.I. Marco Fontana is offered the case by Brandt’s partner who suspects that it was a premeditated murder.

Brandt’s work on the death of Pope John Paul I angered people both in and out of the Church and made him more than a few enemies. His death happens soon after Brandt claims to have evidence implicating newly named people in the Pope’s death — people never suspected of having a part in that deadly conspiracy.

Fontana doesn’t believe in coincidences and takes the case. A lapsed Catholic himself, he knows that uncovering Brandt’s killer means more than exposing a decades old plot to kill the Pope. It could also mean ruin for those named in the documents Brandt claimed to have. He realizes that these same people, having killed such a highly place target, will not hesitate to kill a P.I. who gets too close to the truth.

Entering the arcane world of the Catholic Church, Fontana encounters forces determined to keep him from the truth. Though he manages to gain access to the upper levels of the Archdiocesan hierarchy, Fontana realizes that the web of power and deceit is every bit as intricate, tangled, and deadly as he imagined it might be. As the owner of StripGuyz, a troupe of male strippers he runs to help pay the bills, Fontana is no stranger to the byways of Philly’s gayborhood or the seamier parts of Philadelphia’s gay underworld. But in this case, he finds that there is an even darker side to life in the City of Brotherly Love.