Solid Stiehl (Hymie Stiehl Series) / Hymie Stiehl Series (ePub)

When Hymie Stiehl, one of Chicago's most notorious raconteurs, learns that professional baseball-player and pal Jungle Jim Alavera has disappeared, he knows what he has to do. Realizing that Alavera is still alive but in growing danger, Stiehl fakes his own death only to reemerge in drag to try to locate his compadre. After Stiehl's "snitch," Jimmy the Mole, tracks Alavera to a small brownstone in New Town, Hymie and his college-professor sidekick decide to pay the jock a surprise visit. But when the two walk into a ransacked apartment with the water still warm in the bathtub, Stiehl realizes things are getting serious. Soon, bodies begin turning up like flies at a bad delicatessan.

When the president of Columbia College turns up dead in Stiehl's arms at his sidekick's apartment, Stiehl decides to call in the D.A. and the members of the venerable 12th Precinct. Instead of receiving help, he receives an ultimatum: the D.A. gives him twenty-four hours to surrender Alavera or turn over Stiehl's collegiate colleague for the ballplayer's murder. With little time to lose and an increasingly apprehensive partner on his hands, Stiehl, relying upon one of Ernest Hemingway's least known literary passages, sends the "kid" to talk to the college president's grieving mistress while Stiehl hides the dead man's body until he can clear things up. By the time he reunites with his sidekick, the girl has confessed to having an affair with ballplayer Alavera while dating the college president. Hymie points out that she omitted one small detail from her confession--that she was also dating mobster Sammy the Bull Romano. When Alavera shows up unexpectedly, vowing to protect the woman he loves, Stiehl reminds him he won't have to: "The Mob already has you dead and buried." Not for fooling around with Bull's girl, Stiehl adds, but for failing to throw the 2016 All Star Game, costing Romano a cool million in bets.

In a showdown in Bull's penthouse suite, all hell breaks loose as the cops learn that Sammy has been killed after buying College Prez Alexis and a dirty city alderman one-way tickets to the morgue. They arrest the philandering girlfriend, followed by Alavera, and finally Stiehl's sidekick before Stiehl steps in to set the record straight and reveal to the D.A. who the real murderer is--and why. Later, when the kid asks Stiehl how he figured it all out, the amateur sleuth admits he had a little help. "From an insider?" the kid asks. "No, from an outsider," Stiehl replies. "Papa Hemingway didn't die for nothing, you know."