Domenic Stansberry
Naked Moon
(St. Martin’s Press, March 2010)
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.
Praise for Naked Moon
“We’ve said it all along: whereas others play at noir, Stansberry delivers the real thing. That was true with the marvelous Ancient Rain (2008), and it’s even more true with this latest entry in the Dante Mancuso series. This time the San Francisco P.I.’s shady past (working for a clandestine government security outfit called the Company) comes back to haunt him. Ordinarily, you don’t ever quit the Company, but Dante managed it through some tricky leverage; now the Company has its own leverage in the form of Dante’s cousin, who has turned to the group for help when his warehousing business goes south. “It was nice to think you had a choice, that your actions made a difference one way or another,” Dante muses, but he knows better. Think of the end of For Whom the Bell Tolls—Robert Jordan with a Gatling gun between his legs and the Fascists coming up the mountain en masse—and you’ll have some idea of just how dark the world looks to Dante’s shrouded eyes (and, unlike Jordan, Dante harbors no illusions about honor). As always, Stansberry combines his unrelenting noir world view with remarkably lyrical prose. You want a similar title? Try Mozart’s Requiem.”
–Booklist (Starred Review)
Praise for Domenic Stansberry
“A habit-forming series.”
–The New York Times Book Review
“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 . . . captures the core of Stansberry’s view perfectly, its eloquence suggesting Joyce describing the snow at the end of his celebrated story ‘The Dead.’”
–Booklist (starred review and one of Booklist’s Top Ten Crime Novels of the Year) on The Ancient Rain
“Another fine book by the Edgar Award winner . . . Stansberry is mining a unique terrain.”
–San Francisco Chronicle on The Ancient Rain
“True to the aching regret, something terrible does happen. But it is only one of several hollowed-out moments in this brilliantly sad book. Going for set-piece gems . . . the narrative summons up a once-rich North Beach culture now reduced.”
–The Houston Chronicle on The Ancient Rain
“This brilliantly imagined version of real events packs an emotional wallop [that] genre fiction rarely delivers.”
–Kirkus Reviews (starred review) on The Ancient Rain
“A hypnotic, compelling read. It’s one part Sopranos, another part Greek tragedy.”
–The Boston Globe on The Big Boom
“Stansberry is an extraordinarily evocative writer.”
–George Pelecanos
Domenic Stansberry has been nominated three times for the Edgar Allan Poe Award and received the Edgar for his Hard Case Crime novel The Confession. He received his earlier nominations for The Spoiler and The Last Days of Il Duce (also nominated for the Hammett Prize). His other novels include Manifesto For the Dead, an evocative look at the latter days of pulp writer Jim Thompson.