Joseph Covino

Francesco Ferrari Mines The Mission Joseph Covino

Francesco Ferrari Mines the Mission, a reverent send-up of Alfred Hitchcock's major motion picture masterpiece, VERTIGO(1958), is the third and most epic entry in this crime suspense thriller series. Francesco Ferrari, San Francisco's new iconic private detective for the times(not the dated Sam Spade past), a former Franciscan seminarian-turned-shamus, 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. This time out, Ferrari's hired by the president and CEO of an internet pornography company, located in the city's largely Latin Mission district, to watch and follow his young and enigmatic Catalonian wife, whom he claims is obsessed with a once celebrated but dead Spanish dancer known as Senorita Carmelita. A feminist anti-pornography activist plummets to her death from the Mission Dolores basilica bell-tower and Ferrari's quickly implicated in her demise. Creatively adapting essential elements from both the classic Vertigo novel and movie, this complex, erotic, romantic, and wholly original detective/love story is neither a copycat imitation nor a make-over of the Vertigo story. This is, make no mistake, most definitely not your parents' Vertigo--nor even your grandparents'! Just when you think this story is traversing familiar territory it will deviate drastically into fresh, unfamiliar, and even surreal realms, which will both startle and surprise. Once Ferrari falls--and falls hard he does--for the sultry and seductive subject of his surveillance, becoming obsessed with solving the secret mystery she lures him into, he's forced to follow a haunted trail that turns as emotionally daunting as it does deadly--leading, dizzyingly, to a shocking, climactic conclusion from which the tough and tenacious detective may never fully recover. One you won't see coming. One you won't ever forget. Listen to soundtrack music composed by Bernard Herrmann while reading this book, and you'll believe you're reading a Hitchcock film!