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.
From Publishers Weekly
In Edgar-winner Stansberry's compelling third mystery to feature PI Dante Mancuso (after 2006's The Big Boom), the former San Francisco cop becomes entangled in a cold case surrounding the unintentional shooting death of a woman during a bank robbery involving a group of militant political anarchists in 1976. In a paranoia-fueled post 9-11 America with new antiterror laws, a federal prosecutor with a deep-rooted grudge arrests Bill Owens, an acquaintance of Mancuso's who was the prime suspect in the 1976 murder. Hired to help exonerate Owens, Mancuso tracks down individuals linked to the original case—aging conspirators of a once radical San Francisco underground populated by activists, freethinkers and street poets. But instead of finding justice and some kind of resolution, Mancuso learns firsthand what it feels like to become a victim in a much larger drama being played out between the government and those that oppose its policies. Equal parts contemporary crime fiction and dark, existential poetry, this novel should win Stansberry new fans. (Apr.)
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From Booklist
Starred Review The third volume in Stansberry’s Dante Mancuso series again draws effectively on the rich history of San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood. Chasing the Dragon (2004) looked back to the area’s Italian roots, while The Big Boom (2006) covered the more recent dot-com era. We split the difference here with a gripping noir mystery that takes its plot from events during the radical 1970s, the time of the Symbionese Liberation Army. Mancuso becomes involved in a politically charged case when a fellow PI is arrested suddenly and charged with the murder of an innocent bystander during an SLA-like bank robbery more than 30 years previously. Attempting to track back the initial investigation of the crime, Mancuso resurrects old wounds and simmering resentments as he ponders whether his friend is telling him the truth. It’s a solid enough mystery, oozing the kind of palpable North Beach atmosphere that fans of the series have come to expect, but what makes Stansberry stand out from the crowd is the genuine noir sensibility he brings to his work, the overwhelming feeling that things must go wrong. The last paragraph of this fine novel, reflecting on the “old rain” that keeps falling, even though it doesn’t clean anything, captures the core of Stansberry’s view perfectly, its eloquence suggesting Joyce describing the snow at the end of his celebrated story “The Dead.” --Bill Ott