Chasing the Dragon [Paperback]

Domenic Stansberry (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 21, 2006

A complicated, shadowy man in disgrace, Dante Mancuso leads a double life. Lately, though, the line he walks has become razor thin.

Dante works for The Company, a nebulous security organization operating just this side of the law. Dante wants out, but it's a hard life to leave behind-rich with its own seductions, its own dark attractions.

His latest assignment sends him back to his old North Beach neighborhood in San Francisco. First rendezvous? His estranged father's funeral in the dying heart of Little Italy. Here Dante picks up the strands of his old life and soon finds himself playing an even more elaborate game, a game that involves not just his duplicitous family, but also his ex-fiancée and his former colleagues in the San Francisco Police Department.

Adept as he is, Dante can not play this game forever, pursued by the laconic Frank Ying, a Chinese detective anxious to know the secrets Dante hides. Caught between the sinister imperatives of The Company and the ghosts of his own past, Dante treads a harrowing path to a confrontation more lethal-and more surprising-than he could have imagined.

With Chasing the Dragon, Domenic Stansberry-the acclaimed writer of modern noir-introduces a new hardboiled series set in San Francisco. In this, the series opener, Stansberry tells a story written in clear homage to the masters of the genre, yet with an original, breathtaking voice all his own.

Domenic Stansberry's recent novels include the Edgar Award and Hammett Prize finalist The Last Days of Il Duce, Manifesto for the Dead, and The Confession. He lives with his family in the San Francisco Bay area.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Dante Mancuso has had just about enough of working for "the company," a covert security operation that's sent him to foreign hotspots and left his conscience raging with regrets. So when a seductively distant young contact called "Anita Blonde" assigns him, in Domenic Stansberry's Chasing the Dragon, to return to his hometown of San Francisco, where his estranged father has died in his sleep and where he can help destroy a heroin-smuggling ring, Dante imagines it as an escape. Even though it means reconfronting suspicions he'd brought on himself seven years ago, when as an SFPD homicide cop he’d pushed too hard to probe a customs inspector's death. And even though it will reacquaint him with Marilyn Visconti, the wild-haired Italian who had ditched Dante's cousin to be with him, only to then flee mysteriously.

Edgar-nominated author Stansberry (The Last Days of Il Duce, The Confession) locates this novel's heart and the majority of its action in North Beach, San Francisco's traditionally Italian district of 19th-century rowhouses, "drunks caterwauling in the midnight streets," and "old Calabrese ... all dressed in black, hunched over like crows on the wire." But finding his plot's principal thrust is not quite so easy. Dragon wants to be, at once, an emotionally charged account of Dante's struggle to recalibrate his life (by reconnecting with family and friends, and finally closing the customs inspector case) and a thriller centered around a "sting" meant to trap two drug dealers linked to one of Chinatown's most nefarious old clans. While the latter thread provides some late-chapter fireworks, it's the former that keeps this story enthralling, being nourished by Dante's response to the losses of both his father and uncle, his evolving partnership with a henpecked Chinese-American homicide detective, and his tormented encounters with the contrasting Misses Visconti and Blonde. Long-secreted photographs, a duplicitous pol, and a lawyer with a lust for lamé skirts all contribute intrigue to Stansberry's tale--enough so, that Dante's relative shallowness goes almost unnoticed. Fortunately, this protagonist will have the chance to sprout more dimensions: Chasing the Dragon is the first installment of a new series. --J. Kingston Pierce --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Edgar-finalist Stansberry's strong, no-nonsense crime novel, the first in a new series, pulls few punches. In San Francisco's North Beach neighborhood, Giovanni Mancuso is dying of cancer, but he knows somebody is stalking him. Just before his killer smothers him with a pillow, Mancuso mumbles, "My son will track you down... my son, the cop, my son..." The son, Dante Mancuso, is working in New Orleans for "the company," a nebulous organization that operates just this side of the law. A representative of the company, Anita Blonde, tells him to return to San Francisco for his father's funeral. There he infiltrates a heroin-smuggling operation, which leads to murder and the opportunity to avenge his father's death. Well researched, with ample local color—most of the action takes place in the San Francisco Bay Area—this is a gripping novel with unforeseeable plot twists and some incendiary scenes. Stansberry (The Last Days of Il Duce) has a fine eye for detail that prevents his often grim narrative from becoming merely ghoulish; he evokes the nightmarish criminal underworld without making it too depressing and his protagonist is believable and strangely admirable, even when disposing of a body in San Francisco Bay. This gritty, noirish exercise in murder and drugs feels uncomfortably like the real thing. FYI: Stansberry has also been a Hammett Prize finalist.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Minotaur Books; First Thus edition (March 21, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312324685
• ISBN-13: 978-0312324681
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.2 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,401,240 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars exciting crime thriller, September 29, 2004

By 

Harriet Klausner - See all my reviews
(#1 Hall OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Chasing the Dragon (Hardcover)

After working for the San Francisco Police Department for seven years, Dante Mancuso wasn't satisfied the way a case ended up; he pursued it against the orders of his superiors. Internal Affairs booted him out on trumped up charges. The shadowy Company recruited him and has sent him on assignments around the world. His latest is that he should return to San Francisco, go to his father's funeral, and get reacquainted with old friends and his ex-girlfriend.

He is to arrange a sting between the Wus (a Chinese family with legal and illegal businesses that use the Mancuso warehouse for temporary storage) and two drug traffickers Mason Wow and Yosek Faton (an ex con affiliated with the Nation of Islam). Dante learns that his father thought someone was out to kill him; he gave the negatives of pictures to his brother Sal who gave them to Dante. When Sal is murdered, Dante thinks it has to do with the pictures of illegal immigrants dead in a case on a ship. These pictures lead Dante back to why he was kicked off SFPD with hopes the truth will finally come out during the sting and its aftermath.

The protagonist is a survivor and a man who didn't believe a killer's confession. This led him in to the world of the Company, where rules are made to be broken and operations are quasi-legal. His discovery of the truth about the man's death seven years ago changes nothing and he has to learn to live with his place in the world now. Domenic Stansberry has written an exciting crime thriller where actions are shades of gray and people are not always who they seem.

Harriet Klausner

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Nearly Great, June 17, 2005

By 

John J. Lewis "jlewisdc" (Washington, DC United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Chasing the Dragon (Hardcover)

Interesting characters who all inhabit and are comfortable in the gray area, great descriptions of San Francisco past and present, keen insight into relationships between Chinese and Italians as neighborhoods commingled and histories and cultures intertwined.

This is a brutal book that brings to mind Pelecanos, though not quite as realistic or street wise. Also, not all of the plot lines are fully played out.

Still, an interestng read that asks questions and forces you to think. One note: the typos in the hardback are inexcusable and will hopefully be cleaned up in the paperback version.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Suspenseful -- Great Story!, February 19, 2005

By 

MJO (Ann Arbor, MI) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Chasing the Dragon (Hardcover)

Intricate and suspenseful, Chasing the Dragon is an absorbing, well thought-out mystery. Stansberry is an excellent storyteller, rotating perspectives throughout the book, giving the reader a look into the mindset of good guys and not-so-good guys. He paints a vivid picture of San Francisco with its Chinatown, its shipping docks and its old Italian neighborhoods. The main character, Dante, is one that the reader grows to respect despite the shady work he does and atrocities with which he's involved. We sympathize with him and his lost love, Marilyn, hoping for a reunion. We also hope that he gets to the bottom of the murders that have touched his family. Stansberry masterfully weaves together several lives and their stories while ultimately surprising the reader in the end. After the book was finished, I found myself still thinking about Dante and the rest, wondering if they will ever be the same.

Stansberry is a skilled writer. This book makes me want to read more of his work. From the onset, I was absorbed with the San Francisco scene and the possible underworld of that city-the criminals and the policemen that have to deal with them. I like novels that give me a good feel of a place-like I am right there with the characters. Stansberry does it well. This was definitely a good read. I highly recommend Chasing the Dragon.