A North Beach Mystery Series

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. 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.

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.

Edgar Award winner and master of contemporary noir Domenic Stansberry returns to San Francisco's North Beach and Dante Mancuso, the dark PI who grew up on its tough streets. After a career with a shadowy security firm with interests on both sides of the law, Dante has come home to put all that behind him and has gone to work for a private investigator. A call alerts him early one morning that Bill Owens, a fellow PI, has been charged with a notorious thirty-year-old killing. Bill was involved in a political group in the late sixties, which among other pranks and small-time crimes, held up a bank. Except that time, an innocent bystander was shot and killed. To clear Owens of these charges, Dante will have to retrace the original investigation through San Francisco's radical underground and bring in the man who was pulling the strings. The Ancient Rain is a chilling novel from one of crime fiction's finest. Stansberry spools out a narrative filled with deceit and betrayal, and in his hands the line between justice and revenge is razor sharp.

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. 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.