North Beach Mystery

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.

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.