I find it hard to believe that Domenic Stansberry is not a more famous author. His prose is spare, elegant, and poetic. His characterizations are sharp and insightful. The tales he spins are reminiscent of Ross McDonald's, except that instead of his detective being a lone wolf beholden to no one, Dante Mancuso is enslaved to past memories and present complications of friends and family. This particular tale is an elegy to that moment in time when San Francisco first flirted with the unimaginable wealth of the dot.com era and came up empty. Stansberry's transitional North Beach is as much a character in the novel as the soulless suburbs of LA were in Raymond Chandler's books. This is a detective story infused with wisdom about the seedier side of human nature.

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