The Big Boom

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.