From Publishers Weekly
Dante Mancuso, the beak-nosed PI introduced in Edgar-winner Stansberry's
Chasing the Dragon (2004), returns to prowl the bars and alleys of San Francisco's North Beach in this solid sequel, a dark, moody excursion into neo-noir. The dot-com boom sweeping the city cuts deep into the old Italian heart of the Beach, with longtime residents ready to sell high and move out, and newcomers desperate for enough money to grab a toehold. When a corpse found floating in the bay is identified as Angie Antonelli, a former lover of the detective, Dante confronts the victim's boss at a startup company and tracks down other employees who have moved on in the volatile job market. Soon the PI meets the crew of killers with a perverse fondness for drowning; he grosses one out with "that thing in the middle of his face…. a crime against nature." Stansberry offers his usual flawless evocation of place in another fine Chandleresque meditation on a world haunted by crime.
(May) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* The second Dante Mancuso novel (following
Chasing the Dragon, 2004) takes place just as the dot-com bubble is bursting and the Bay Area is beginning to feel the shock waves: "It was the double trap, the two-way fix. Prices would go up, but there would be no jobs. There would be money, but not for you, not for me." Stansberry's noir sensibility runs so deep, and his sense of the inexorable grip in which the past holds the present is so strong, that he is able to take a seemingly soulless contemporary phenomenon--dot-com speculation--and give it the same chilling, metaphorical resonance that the postwar noir masters gave to a darkened city street or a tilted Venetian blind. Mancuso, formerly a deep-cover CIA agent, is back in North Beach, where he grew up, working as a private detective and trying to put his life together, but even though the old neighborhood has been transformed--the old Italian families have gone or are being forced out by dot-com millionaires--the echoes remain. This time the past announces itself when the body of one of Dante's former lovers washes up in the bay. Her parents ask him to investigate, and the trail leads both back into North Beach history and forward into that twenty-first-century demilitarized zone where cyberspace collides with flesh-and-blood reality. To all those mystery readers who believe that the classic detective story has played itself out, Stansberry delivers a bracing slap upside the head. And it feels so good.
Bill OttCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
