Francesco Ferrari Combs North Beach (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780943283418)

San Francisco has a new iconic private detective for the times, a complex character you will come to care deeply about. His name's Francesco Ferrari. A former Franciscan seminarian-turned-shamus, he drives a Ferrari California T sports car, packs a .357 magnum and operates out of a flat in the historic Buena Vista Cafe on the city's northern waterfront. And he covers only those cases affecting the city he loves-his namesake City of Saint Francis. In this continuation sequel, Francesco Ferrari Combs North Beach, Francesco Ferrari's latest case begins with a big bang once a Cadillac and two driverless Tesla cars collide and explode on the crooked section of the city's famed Lombard Street. A mysterious Egyptian harboring secret motives hires Ferrari to find a missing associate whose photograph reveals him to be Ferrari's familiar mobster nemesis, Vic Velotta, who may or may not have survived his presumed demise in the preceding saga. Before long, after seeking out the help of Velotta's favorite henchman and an investigative journalist, Ferrari becomes entangled with the Egyptian's youthful femme fatale, a teenage French prostitute; gets threatened by the FBI; and discovers the brutal strangulation murder of a Bureau clerk who's leaked to criminals the name of an important government informant. That's just the start of a complicated case involving the city's dark underworld of fancy brothels, hookers, dives, residential hotels--and even the past hangouts of Beatnik poets--as Ferrari scours North Beach in search of something even more sinister: the reason why some secret software could aid and abet a nefarious terrorist plot. With the informant as the living pawn in a deadly shell game, Ferrari's pitted against FBI agents and killers in a race against time to prevent the plot and save the life of the young girl he's slowly falling for. A climactic confrontation at San Francisco's celebrated Coit Tower decides who survives the fatal collision of opposing forces.