The Ancient Rain

If you like intensely deep characterizaton to go with a plot that will make you think, then read anything by Domenic Stansberry. This is no exception.

Dante Mancuso, a PI from San Francisco's North Beach neighborhood, gets a call one morning from Bill Owens, another PI whom he knows slightly. Owens is being arrested for a robbery that occurred 27 years earlier when he was active with the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), a splinter radical group briefly famous for kidnapping and supposedly radicalizing heiress Patty Hearst. A woman bank customer was killed in the robbery. Owens asks Dante to take care of the kids until Owens's wife returns from a business trip. Owens's lawyers later involve Dante as an investigator. But he has an unfortunate penchant for the truth that is not altogether welcome to the defense. This dark novel is about the past's unrelenting grip on the present. All the main characters have been twisted a bit by life. None of them is both direct and straight with anyone else. All of them have agendas based on secrets, desires, lusts of all kinds (including for revenge and for love), politics and losses. Truth has little place on anyone's agenda (except Dante's). Every character is irretrievably marked by life and driven by what they have become to do what they think will make them happy. Yet what they do almost certainly will add to their misery. The book conveys an atmosphere of foreboding throughout. The characters are all too lifelike, and disaster begins to seem inevitable. The plot seems loosely based on the 1975 robbery of the Crocker National Bank in Carmichael, California by five surviving SLA members (all others having died in a police attack/shootout in 1974). As in the book, a woman customer died from a possibly accidental shotgun blast. The case was resurrected and tried in 2002 during the initial wave of anti-terrorism reaction to 9/11. The book is well done, well plotted and believable but would not be for readers who like stories fully tied up and the lines between good and bad clear.

The scene is San Francisco and the city is still reeling from 9/11. A prosecutor has ordered Bill Owens arrested for a crime committed years ago. The arrest takes place as Owens is driving his children to school. Owensâ~ wife, Jill, is an attorney who is out of town on business. Owens phones Dante Mancuso and begs him to pick up the children and care for them until Jill returns home. Dante Mancuso is a PI and not a close friend of Owens but he does agree to care for the children and convinces his girlfriend Marilyn to help him. Owens was accused of shooting a woman during a bank robbery years ago but it was never proven that he was even present at the bank. Elise Younger, the victim's young daughter, was waiting outside the bank when her mother was killed. Elise has been crusading ever since to see Owens behind bars for the murder of her mother. Dante Mancuso attempts to find out what really happened during the bank robbery but those with knowledge of that time have moved on and are not interested in delving into the past. So many lives are touched tragically by this story. Elise has spent her entire adulthood seeking revenge. Dante's investigation brings tragedy to one close to him. Sorrentino, a PI who has been assisting Elise, remembers the tragedy of his past and the death of his son. The Ancient Rain is an excellent book but sadly reflects on lives that have been wasted seeking revenge. I have not read the previous Dante Mancuso novels but I intend to now. Armchair Interviews says: A strong mystery--with a stronger message about revenge.

San Francisco Private Investigator Bill Owens asks his colleague Dante Mancuso of Cicero Investigations for a favor; keep his two frightened children, fourteen years old Kate and ten years old Zeke safe while he is charged with murder; his wife attorney Jill is in Chicago. Twenty-seven years ago, Bill was part of a radical group, the Symbonise Liberation Army that killed Eleanor Younger while robbing a bank. Eleanor had left her eleven years old daughter Elise in the car and so she witnessed the murder of her mom. She accuses Bill Owens who came out without a mask of her mom's murder. The Feds go all out to nail Bill while his backers hire Dante to investigate. As he makes inquires to a homicide that occurred thirty years ago and is colder than the tundra except for the eye witness; Dante begins to close in on the puppeteer who manipulated what happened then and what is happening now. The third Mancuso private investigative tale (see BIG BOOM and CHASING THE DRAGON) is a superb urban noir that uses history to include the Symbonise Liberation Army of Patty Heart fame and much more like the title coming from a poem by Bob Kaufman. Bill pegs Dante as the perfect person to protect his kids as he knows that the mane never let's anything go; and he proves totally right especially with a late twist. From the moment that Bill is stopped on the bay Bridge with the cops ignoring his two kids sitting in the back seat in stark terror as they are inconsequential to the arrest until the climatic end, fans will read this strong suspenseful tale in one shocking sitting. Harriet Klausner