The Big Boom

by Domenic Stansberry

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781429909211
Publisher:	St. Martin's Publishing Group
Publication date:	04/01/2007
Series:	A North Beach Mystery , #2
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Domenic Stansberry's previous novels include The Confession, an Edgar Award winner; Chasing the Dragon; the Edgar Award and Hammett Prize finalist The Last Days of Il Duce; and Manifesto for the Dead. He lives with his family in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Domenic Stansberry’s previous novels include The Confession, an Edgar Award winner; Chasing the Dragon; the Edgar Award and Hammett Prize finalist The Last Days of Il Duce; and Manifesto for the Dead. He lives with his family in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One
It was the time of the big boom and everyone figured the prosperity would last forever. There had been other booms before, but those had always been followed by calamity--a bust that took away everything the good times had given, then kept on taking. This boom would be different, people said. The Transamerica Pyramid at the end of Kearney seemed almost to glow, and the bankers who worked inside issued a stream of proofs and prognostications. Meanwhile the streets swelled with new arrivals. The old-timers found the new enthusiasm insufferable, but the old-timers found everything insufferable. The truth was, you could see a certain gleam in their eyes, too, and at night the streets along North Beach echoed with the sounds of pleasure: from Tosca's to the Café Sport to the old U.S. Restaurant. The lines were long and there was a restive, animal smell. Those with pressing reservations left their cars along Kearney, double-parked, to be fetched from impound in the morning by couriers who specialized in the service. Such behavior did not seem extravagant under the circumstances. The bounty of the moment was infinite, after all--if only you could reach out and extend your grasp.

Meanwhile it was still possible--strolling down Columbus, perhaps, or turning a corner on Grant--to meet the plaintive stare of someone not sharing in the general prosperity. Sometimes at night, alone on your mattress, you might hear a soft cry. If you went to the window, though--nothing.

Just the fog and the darkened row houses and the arc lamp casting its blue light on the corner.

It was possible to experience doubt at such moments, of course, even if you realized such doubts would inevitably give way in the morning to the knowledge that the old order was evaporating. That soon everything would be transformed. If you continued to doubt, all you had to do was glance at the Pyramid for reassurance. Or at the newspapers. Or at the people absorbed in their handheld devices. So, after a while, if you heard those soft cries at night, you did not go to the window. And walking the streets, you did not meet those plaintive glances. You did not notice. Just as no one noticed, this particular evening, the corpse floating in the water.

The corpse surfaced at the end of the pier, floating in the manner that corpses float, face down, arms dangling. The corpse wore a silk blouse, the pearls still about the neck, the skirt ballooning from the flesh.

There were a number of people out strolling, stopping at the railing, gazing at the bay, at the numinous reflections skittering across its black surface. But no one noticed the dark form in the water, or if they did, they did not attach to it any significance. Perhaps their eyes were focused on the distance, on the lights glittering on the horizon. Or perhaps on something within--some notion they could not quite possess.

Meanwhile, a steamer passed, and the corpse rocked with the swells, the head gently thudding against the pilings. Sometime in the morning, just as the sky was graying, the body submerged again, not wholly, but just enough to slip beneath the pier. The morning crowds came. They disembarked from the ferry, walked along the wooden planks, ate on the benches. The corpse floated beneath them, lodged on the piling, just out of view. A stench rose--masked in part by the water, it was true, by the smells of the bay--but no one went to look. Perhaps no one would have discovered it at all if not for a fisherman--a boy, really, a kid from the Chinatown projects--who two days later got his line, his favorite lure, tangled in the darkness beneath the pier.

Copyright © 2006 by Domenic Stansberry

Editorial Reviews

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 2006 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

San Francisco private investigator Dante Mancuso (Chasing the Dragon) is back in his old North Beach neighborhood living in a fleabag apartment while renting his mother's house to a couple in the high-tech industry. Probing the disappearance of old girlfriend Angela Antonelli, Dante has a bad feeling when the body of a young woman is pulled from the bay. As Dante pursues clues, no one is telling all that they know, and the guilt piles up in a community in the midst of a dot-com boom. Stansberry, the Edgar Award-winning author of The Confession, writes in a deliberate manner, examining each fact and every nuance until it becomes clear that there is more than meets the eye. All the while, the technology market is about to crash-and we know what that means for San Francisco. This dark and introspective crime novel will appeal to hard-boiled devotees. Stansberry lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. [See Prepub Mystery, LJ 1/06.] Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Private eye Dante Mancuso, pounding the mean streets of San Francisco, investigates whodunit to a former girlfriend. There was a time when all North Beach thought Angie Antonelli and Dante Mancuso were a match. Eventually, however, they flared out. Now Angie's on a slab in the county morgue, and Dante, looking down at her, feels she's saying, "Don't abandon me." No chance. As an SFPD cop, Dante Mancuso was a famous obsessive, the kind who never forgot an unsolved case. Now Nick Antonelli, Angie's angry dad, has hired Cicero Investigations, Dante's current employer, to pressure the police into labeling her death a homicide and nailing the perp. Chief among the people of interest is Angie's ex-boss and lover Michael Solano, who heads Solano Enterprises, a glitzy venture-capital operation that spews snake oil when Dante digs into it. Maybe Angie was a potential whistleblower, he thinks. If she was, did she need to be silenced? Was Nick Antonelli dead right to push the cops? Suddenly, just when it seems the answer must be yes, the investigation's called off-by Nick. How come?Lean, literate, atmospheric stuff, ideal for the noir-is-beautiful set. But Stansberry (Chasing the Dragon, 2004, etc.), whose touch gets surer every time, now rates a wider audience as well.

Kirkus Reviews

A hypnotic, compelling read. It's one part Sopranos, another part Greek tragedy.” —The Boston Globe

“Broodingly atmospheric . . . Readers will find themselves absorbed.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“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.” —Booklist (starred review)

“Lean, literate, atmospheric stuff . . .” —Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher