North Beach Mystery Series by Domenic Stansberry
North Beach Mystery #1
Chasing the Dragon
Domenic Stansberry
A complicated, shadowy man in disgrace, Dante Mancuso leads a double life. Lately, though, the line he walks has become razor thin. Dante works for The Company, a nebulous security organization operating just this side of the law. Dante wants out, but it's a hard life to leave behind-rich with its own seductions, its own dark attractions. His latest assignment sends him back to his old North Beach neighborhood in San Francisco. First rendezvous? His estranged father's funeral in the dying heart of Little Italy. Here Dante picks up the strands of his old life and soon finds himself playing an even more elaborate game, a game that involves not just his duplicitous family, but also his ex-fiancée and his former colleagues in the San Francisco Police Department. Adept as he is, Dante can not play this game forever, pursued by the laconic Frank Ying, a Chinese detective anxious to know the secrets Dante hides. Caught between the sinister imperatives of The Company and the ghosts of his own past, Dante treads a harrowing path to a confrontation more lethal-and more surprising-than he could have imagined. With Chasing the Dragon, Domenic Stansberry-the acclaimed writer of modern noir-introduces a new hardboiled series set in San Francisco. In this, the series opener, Stansberry tells a story written in clear homage to the masters of the genre, yet with an original, breathtaking voice all his own. Domenic Stansberry's recent novels include the Edgar Award and Hammett Prize finalist The Last Days of Il Duce, Manifesto for the Dead, and The Confession. He lives with his family in the San Francisco Bay area. Amazon.com ReviewDante Mancuso has had just about enough of working for "the company," a covert security operation that's sent him to foreign hotspots and left his conscience raging with regrets. So when a seductively distant young contact called "Anita Blonde" assigns him, in Domenic Stansberry's Chasing the Dragon, to return to his hometown of San Francisco, where his estranged father has died in his sleep and where he can help destroy a heroin-smuggling ring, Dante imagines it as an escape. Even though it means reconfronting suspicions he'd brought on himself seven years ago, when as an SFPD homicide cop he’d pushed too hard to probe a customs inspector's death. And even though it will reacquaint him with Marilyn Visconti, the wild-haired Italian who had ditched Dante's cousin to be with him, only to then flee mysteriously.Edgar-nominated author Stansberry (The Last Days of Il Duce, The Confession) locates this novel's heart and the majority of its action in North Beach, San Francisco's traditionally Italian district of 19th-century rowhouses, "drunks caterwauling in the midnight streets," and "old Calabrese ... all dressed in black, hunched over like crows on the wire." But finding his plot's principal thrust is not quite so easy. Dragon wants to be, at once, an emotionally charged account of Dante's struggle to recalibrate his life (by reconnecting with family and friends, and finally closing the customs inspector case) and a thriller centered around a "sting" meant to trap two drug dealers linked to one of Chinatown's most nefarious old clans. While the latter thread provides some late-chapter fireworks, it's the former that keeps this story enthralling, being nourished by Dante's response to the losses of both his father and uncle, his evolving partnership with a henpecked Chinese-American homicide detective, and his tormented encounters with the contrasting Misses Visconti and Blonde. Long-secreted photographs, a duplicitous pol, and a lawyer with a lust for lamé skirts all contribute intrigue to Stansberry's tale--enough so, that Dante's relative shallowness goes almost unnoticed. Fortunately, this protagonist will have the chance to sprout more dimensions: Chasing the Dragon is the first installment of a new series. --J. Kingston PierceFrom Publishers WeeklyEdgar-finalist Stansberry's strong, no-nonsense crime novel, the first in a new series, pulls few punches. In San Francisco's North Beach neighborhood, Giovanni Mancuso is dying of cancer, but he knows somebody is stalking him. Just before his killer smothers him with a pillow, Mancuso mumbles, "My son will track you down... my son, the cop, my son..." The son, Dante Mancuso, is working in New Orleans for "the company," a nebulous organization that operates just this side of the law. A representative of the company, Anita Blonde, tells him to return to San Francisco for his father's funeral. There he infiltrates a heroin-smuggling operation, which leads to murder and the opportunity to avenge his father's death. Well researched, with ample local color—most of the action takes place in the San Francisco Bay Area—this is a gripping novel with unforeseeable plot twists and some incendiary scenes. Stansberry (The Last Days of Il Duce) has a fine eye for detail that prevents his often grim narrative from becoming merely ghoulish; he evokes the nightmarish criminal underworld without making it too depressing and his protagonist is believable and strangely admirable, even when disposing of a body in San Francisco Bay. This gritty, noirish exercise in murder and drugs feels uncomfortably like the real thing. FYI: Stansberry has also been a Hammett Prize finalist. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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North Beach Mystery #2
The Big Boom
Domenic Stansberry
Edgar Award--winning author Domenic Stansberry is known for his intensity---his dark thrillers, thick with suspense, in which the differences between good and evil are not so easy to decipher. The Big Boom is just such a novel: set in San Francisco, at the peak of the high-tech frenzy, just before the technology markets and the California economy all go bust. **** The Big Boom features the return of Dante Mancuso, the hero of Stansberry's Chasing the Dragon, an obsessive private investigator working the streets of his San Francisco neighborhood. He is a dark-eyed, complex figure---melancholic, tender, with fierce, aquiline good looks---known to neighborhood familiars by his nickname: the Pelican. Dante's nickname---like the demons that haunt his personal life---comes from his family on account of his tenacity, and his large, Sicilian nose. Now Dante has settled into a new apartment in North Beach, hoping to put those demons behind him and patch together a life with his longtime lover, Marilyn Visconte, but before long he is approached by an old North Beach family in hopes that he will find their missing daughter---a young woman, a former sweetheart, with whom Dante had been involved years before---and his newfound peace is shattered. Dante's search for Angela Antonelli, though, has hardly begun when the corpse of a young woman is dredged from the bay. He soldiers on in his investigation, fearful that the missing woman and the corpse are one and the same. His search for the missing woman---even after he has been called off the case---becomes an obsession that alienates his current lover, but Dante follows the ghostly trail anyway into the heart of the financial district and the underside of the dot-com revolution. It is a quest rendered in the staccato prose of the genre, a style that---in Stansberry's hands---takes on a dreamlike cast, hallucinatory at times, blurring the lines between reality and Dante's own dark nostalgia. ** The Big Boom is a tightrope of a novel, a taut story about familial duplicity, personal greed, and the desperate pull of love even across the divide of memory.**
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North Beach Mystery #4
Naked Moon
Domenic Stansberry
Set in San Francisco in the crumbling vestiges of Italian North Beach, Domenic Stansberry’s latest novel plunges once again into the noir underworld of Dante Mancuso. This new installment of Stansberry’s critically acclaimed series, Naked Moon, unearths a past Mancuso had hoped to escape. Before becoming a private investigator, Dante worked for a secret corporate security firm---known simply as the company---that prized effectiveness over legality. When Dante left, it was not on good terms. So he made sure to take enough inside information to keep himself safe from reprisal. Dante, however, has his own secrets; for example, he doesn’t ask his cousin Gary questions about how he keeps the family warehousing business---the one where Dante is a silent partner---in the black, while everyone else’s has failed. When SFPD Detective Leanora Chin starts asking questions, Gary turns to the company for help, which they’re willing to provide, so long as Dante agrees to settle his past debts by doing them one last favor: the type of favor that could drag him under for good. Edgar Award winner Domenic Stansberry is one of the most talented crime novelists working today. His novels are dark, lyrical, and widely acclaimed, and Naked Moon is no exception as it captures the sense of dread, paranoia, and quiet despair that cling to a man and a part of a city living on borrowed time.From Publishers WeeklyIn Edgar-winner Stansberry's strong fourth novel to feature San Francisco PI Dante Mancuso (after 2008's The Ancient Rain), leaked secrets about the company, Mancuso's shadowy former employer (a front for intelligence operations), prompt the company to end the stalemate that allowed Dante to walk away in the previous book. Meanwhile, Leanora Chin, a cop with Special Investigations, is threatening Dante's cousin Gary, who runs a shady warehouse operation. Gary fears the wrath of the powerful Wu Benevolent Association if he cooperates with Chin. The company tells Gary it can halt the investigation if Dante will help the company. Trapped in a three-way vise, Dante searches for a way to neutralize the explicit threats to his cousin and others dear to him, while knowing that the only permanent solution is to disappear. San Francisco's North Beach is a virtual character as the stoic Dante fearlessly plays out the poor hand he's been dealt against a table of sharks with all the chips in the pot. (Mar.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From BooklistStarred Review We’ve said it all along: whereas others play at noir, Stansberry delivers the real thing. That was true with the marvelous Ancient Rain (2008), and it’s even more true with this latest entry in the Dante Mancuso series. This time the San Francisco P.I.’s shady past (working for a clandestine government security outfit called the Company) comes back to haunt him. Ordinarily, you don’t ever quit the Company, but Dante managed it through some tricky leverage; now the Company has its own leverage in the form of Dante’s cousin, who has turned to the group for help when his warehousing business goes south. “It was nice to think you had a choice, that your actions made a difference one way or another,” Dante muses, but he knows better. Think of the end of For Whom the Bell Tolls—Robert Jordan with a Gatling gun between his legs and the Fascists coming up the mountain en masse—and you’ll have some idea of just how dark the world looks to Dante’s shrouded eyes (and, unlike Jordan, Dante harbors no illusions about honor). As always, Stansberry combines his unrelenting noir world view with remarkably lyrical prose. You want a similar title? Try Mozart’s Requiem. --Bill Ott
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