Hang My Head and Cry

Pat Montella #2

by Elena Santangelo

With By Blood Possessed , Santangelo introduced an unusual mystery heroine, a woman with one foot in today and one foot in history: Quite literally, Pat Montella can "see" into the past. Now Pat has given up her city life and moved onto Miss Maggie Shelby's Civil War-era estate, an estate which Pat will someday inherit. Suddenly her visions return, and Pat begins to see 1870s Virginia through the eyes of a young slave. The personality of this 10-year-old boy, Emancipation, known as "Mance", seems harmless enough, but when Pat and Miss Maggie uncover a skeleton on the estate grounds, once again past and present collide and Pat must use her unusual talents to solve this intricate, intriguing mystery.

Genres: Mystery, Southern

336 pages, Hardcover

First published April 4, 2001

About the author

ELENA SANTANGELO pens the Possessed Mystery series, including Agatha Award finalist BY BLOOD POSSESSED. The series features laid-off office clerk turned ghostbuster, Pat Montella, and her 91 year-old sidekick, Miss Maggie. These novels combine murder, ghosts, history, and a protagonist brought up on Italian cooking and superstitions. Latest in the series is FEAR ITSELF, in which a ghost from the Great Depression helps Pat solve a present day murder in her hometown.

Elena's Twins Mystery Series begins with the novel TWO-FACED, which introduces Gen Ziegler, forensic psychologist, and her mirror-image twin, Sara. In THE TODD CHRONICLES, Todd MacBride, a geeky psych student, appoints himself as Gen Ziegler's "Dr. Watson" as he puts a hilarious spin on her Tucson cases. The series continues most recently with DOUBLE CROSS, when the sisters become stranded in a West Texas town, surrounded by secrets, outlaws, danger, and murder.

DAME AGATHA'S SHORTS is Elena's armchair companion to Christie's more than one hundred and fifty short stories. DAME AGATHA'S SHORTS won the 2009 Agatha Award for Best Non-Fiction and is an Anthony Award and Macavity Award finalist.

Elena's short stories have been published in the United States and Japan and most are available individually on Kindle. You can also find 16 of them in the SHORT CUTS TO MAYHEM anthology. She co-edited the short story anthologies, DEATH KNELL IV and DEATH KNELL V.

YESTERDAY, TODAY & FOREVER is a non-fiction book about Elena's uncle, Joseph B. Chicco, the journal he kept while serving aboard the U.S.S. Mobile in 1945 during World War II, and the PTSD that plagued him the rest of his life.

Contact her at www.elenasantangelo.com"

Reviews

[anne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sometimes disorienting with how the main storyline gets dragged on and everything’s thrown around—politics, ghosts stories, archeology trivia, and the bouts of Miss Maggie (which I love)—but the diary (?) entries made it more compelling and it’s taken away by the nice plot twist at the end.

[Avid Series Reader · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hang My Head and Cry by Elena Santangelo is the second book of the Pat Montella historical mystery series set in contemporary as well as in 1871 Virginia. Pat lives with Miss Maggie Shelby on the estate she will inherit, where she is helping to set up a foundation for historical research and preservation. Pat can occasionally see and hear the ghosts of those who lived and suffered nearby. She is visited by the ghost of a young boy "Mance", telling of a church and a residence burning. From accounts of the fires in archives, Pat and Miss Maggie pinpoint the timeframe to July 1871 and identify Mance as Emancipation Jackson, born to a former slave just after the proclamation. In Miss Maggie's yard under her grandfather's flowerbed, they find a skull. Emma, an archaeologist from the university, comes to excavate. Her assistant Theo turns out to be descended from Mance. Murder interrupts the dig and their research; they must investigate the past (distant and recent) to solve murders in the present. Chapters from Pat's point of view are interspersed with chapters from Mance's point of view, describing the racial turmoil of 1871 and inhumane treatment of freedmen.

[Sharon Norman · Rating 2 out of 5]

Okay, but definitely not a page turner. Current day murder mystery, ghost story (Civil War ghost) Also wrote By Blood Possessed

[Linda Gagliardi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Continuation of the Pat Montella historical/present day series.