After an old man with a dark past smashes the guitar of private investigator Eliot Conte's adopted child Angel, the man is mysteriously killed. The violence-prone Conte becomes the chief suspect. Angel, a gifted hacker, digs into the past of the old man only to discover a notorious cold case, the murder of Fred Morelli. The past unfolds under the skilled computer hands of Angel coupled with the coaxing of the Golden Boys, a group of neighborhood guys well along in years, long obsessed by the murder of their very own Italian-American Jay Gatsby, the owner of a long lost night spot, The Ace of Clubs.

The 'Morelli' of the title is a man of American history. The major events of his life, told herein, are not fictional. Fred Morelli was born in Fiumefreddo, Italy in 1901 and died in Utica, New York in 1947 - the victim of the most notorious, and theatrical, of unsolved murders in Utica's long history of unsolved murders. Were I to be asked about the relationship of historical fact to fiction in the depiction of Fred Morelli's life and death, I would quote Marcel Proust: 'I invented nothing; I imagined everything.'