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.