Reviews

Foul deeds and rampant greed in San Francisco

By Hallie Ephron, published in the Boston Globe June 25, 2006

Domenic Stansberry's ``The Big Boom" is a thinking man's (or woman's) noir, a story set in San Francisco at that moment when the dot-com boom is about to implode. Homicide-cop-turned-private investigator Dante Mancuso, who made his first appearance in Stansberry's 2004 Edgar-winning ``Chasing the Dragon," investigates the disappearance of Angela Antonelli, a young woman who recently quit her job at a dot-com that was about to go public.

An unpredictable, edgy outsider known for his nose -- ``The dangling fish. The big banana " -- Dante has been assigned to the case because the missing woman was once his girlfriend, and because his boss thinks he can handle Angela's explosive father, Nick Antonelli. Nick is a barely reconstructed gangster who wheels and deals in real estate. When Angie's corpse is found, caught in the pilings of a San Francisco pier, Nick rants and rages, refusing to collect her body from the morgue until he finds out who's responsible for her death.

Dante investigates, and his search for answers takes him and the reader somewhere very dark indeed.

This novel paints a vivid picture of a time when ``the bounty of the moment was infinite." Frenzied executives, fueled by greed and hubris, manipulated balance sheets to lure venture capital and flogged ``vaporware" when real products failed to materialize on time. In retrospect, the collapse that buried those in its path seems inevitable.

With its passages of elegiac prose, the novel is a hypnotic, compelling read. It's one part ``Sopranos," another part Greek tragedy, with Dante playing the role of the chorus. Characterizations are rich, often funny. As its untidy but satisfying ending approached, I found myself reading more slowly; and when it was over I sat there thinking about the dark shadows the story cast.

Laurie R. King fuses her two series into one in ``The Art of Detection." She wraps a Sherlock Holmes pastiche of murder in 1920s San Francisco inside a present-day story of a murder investigation by police detective Kate Martinelli. The day-to-day drama of Kate's life with partner Lee and daughter Nora adds a third element to the package.

Kate and Detective Alonzo Hawkin investigate a dead body dumped in a remote gun emplacement in Golden Gate Park. The victim, Philip Gilbert, a tall, slender man with a hawklike nose, turns out to be an avid, verging on rabid, collector of Holmes memorabilia

When the detectives go to Gilbert's home, they find two worlds -- pure Victoriana, down to gaslight sconces, on the bottom floors; an ultra-modern office and living quarters on top. Turns out Gilbert lived a double life. A neighbor reports that one day he dressed in ``clothes that could have come from the Gap, [said] hi, [got] into his car, [drove] away." The next day he looked ``like something out of a Fred Astaire movie," walked where he needed to go, and greeted her with ``Good afternoon."

A typewritten manuscript that Gilbert recently purchased may hold the key to his murder. It may be a priceless, unpublished Sherlock Holmes story written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle when he visited San Francisco. If so, it will revolutionize the world of Sherlockian scholarship. Kate gets a copy of the manuscript, and soon she and the reader are deep into it, discovering disturbing parallels between its story and Gilbert's murder.

Sadly, the pieces of this ambitious novel fail to come together. The Holmes pastiche is too much of a good thing, and the modern family drama veers perilously close to preachiness. Perhaps more patient readers will relish the richness of this tale within a tale, but I found it rough sledding.

Nineteen-year-old college student Megan Thompson is ``The Abortionist's Daughter" in Elisabeth Hyde's literary mystery.

Megan's mother, Dr. Diana Duprey, is a skilled physician with a healing touch who runs an abortion clinic; she's also a flawed human being with a sharp tongue, a quick temper, and spotty parenting skills. Though she's no proselytizer for abortion -- when she was pregnant with an infant diagnosed with Down syndrome, she opted to have the child -- she vigorously supports a woman's right to choose and sees her mission as helping women ``push the reset button." When she's found murdered, there's no shortage of suspects; she and her clinic have been the target of threats and attacks.

Megan is at school when she learns of her mother's drowning death in the family's lap pool. She returns to find her home occupied by police, and her father, District Attorney Frank Thompson, suspected of the murder. Appealingly written, Megan teeters between adolescence and adulthood, mercurial one moment and sensible the next.

What a pleasure it is to read this well-crafted novel with complicated characters and interesting ideas. This is no polemic for or against abortion; instead it thoughtfully explores the illusion of choice and spins a tale rife with tragic consequences.

The Big Boom
By Domenic Stansberry
St. Martin’s, 272 pp., $23.95

The Art of Detection
By Laurie R. King
Bantam, 358 pp., $24

The Abortionist’s Daughter
By Elisabeth Hyde
Knopf, 285 pp., $23.95