Chasing the Dragon

An ex-San Francisco cop working for a shadowy organization tackles a slippery assignment in the wake of his father's death in this hard-boiled mystery series debut by an Edgar and Hammett Award–winning author.

"[A] strong, no-nonsense crime novel [that] pulls few punches. . . . Stansberry . . . has a fine eye for detail . . . 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." —Publishers Weekly

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 cannot 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.