FAMILY BUSINESS

The author who put Indianapolis on the private-eye map (Underdog, 1993, etc.) turns his attention to the Lunghis—Angelo and his wife Gina, their children Marie and David, Angelo's sister Rosetta, his part-time brother Salvatore, and of course Mama and the Old Man—all members of Bath's only family of private detectives, who seem to specialize in investigating the most trivial crimes imaginable. Ceramic painter Eileen Shayler offers ú500 to find out why her husband left the dish detergent in a different spot, and model Kit Bridges complains about a man who's been passing her photo around in bars pretending to be a detective. On the home front—okay, everything here is on the home front—Rose frets about her married boyfriend's vasectomy; Salvatore's latest girlfriend has her eye on somebody else; and when Angelo hooks up the bugging equipment he's borrowed from persistent salesman Adrian Boiling, the first thing he hears is Marie making mysterious calls to her shady friend Terry about easy money. There's a murder wrapped up in here somewhere, but if you don't look close, you'll miss it—and you may not realize when the book is over either. A drolly minimalist sitcom whirligig with bits of mystery pureed in tiny doses like so many jalape§o peppers.