Domenic Stansberry

“But sometimes people just did not want to bury their dead.”

This is a melancholy read, full of sadness and death, but I really liked it! The first three pages are amazing, and set the tone for the book. Dante is investigating the death of an old friend/lover, and the ghosts of his, and his neighborhood's past, follow him everywhere. Everything, and everyone, in this story seem maudlin - remembering the old days, while the new San Francisco has changed in ways that are no longer show more recognizable. The time period of this tale is right at the precipice when the dotcom boom went bust, and The City was irrevocably changed. For the worse, most 'old timers' believe.
Like I said, I really enjoyed reading this, as I did the first one, and I'm eager to read number three. Dante is such a strong character, and I love all the Italian life detailed on these pages. And I've always been a sucker for anything in, or on, North Beach! show less

Short chapters, short sections, shifting times and places… Domenic Stansberry’s The White Devil is a fast, first-person read with deeply flawed characters, an unrelenting sense for noir, beautiful cities and people, and a deep dark tie to a modern time of change. The protagonist is fleeing a danger, as yet unexplained, when the story begins. She is guilty or innocent, beautiful or ugly, powerful or weak… the reader has yet to learn. And in learning, the reader will see Rome’s show more darkness, man’s inhumanity, sexual temptation and power all rolled into one—or into two, since this protagonist has a brother and their lives are wholly intertwined.

Politics and religion form a backdrop, not unsurprisingly as the story’s set in Rome around a time of papal change. But the foreground is painted in decadence, where power replaces romance, and temptation replaces hope. Emotions true and manufactured, like the highs and lows of society’s underworld, bleed from the page. The story’s very European despite its American protagonist, definitely noir despite its soul-searching, and hauntingly Hemmingway-esque.

Not for the faint-hearted or the pure of spirit, The White Devil is a fast, furious read of trials and temptations, love, lust and loss.

Disclosure: I was given a copy and I freely offer my honest review. show less

A well-written noir about a man caught in something a bit beyond his understanding, and how the scope of what he doesn't understand expands to swallow his world.

North Beach is home to Italian-Americans, invading yuppies, and a murderer or two. Stansberry fuses a classic noir sensibility with the feverish mood of the nineties, when vaporware promises and stock market frenzy reached the tipping point. Though the greed is nineties, the mood is fifties noir, and the final reckoning as inevitable as Greek tragedy.