The Lizard

by Domenic Stansberry

After a near decade of silence, Edgar and Hammett award winning novelist Domenic Stansberry returns to the mystery scene with a chilling new The Lizard .In 2016, six years after the conclusion of his acclaimed North Beach Series, Stansberry returned to win the Hammett Prize with The White Devil. Now he comes with The Lizard—part political thriller, part expressionist nightmare—a timely contemporary tale of betrayal, murder and violent transformation, dark stuff laced with the author's signature black humor.The main character, S.E. Reynolds, is a former investigative reporter now working as a political ghostwriter. He is thrust into the center of a conspiracy investigation after an illicit romance turns deadly. His efforts to untangle himself only entangle him deeper, drawing the attention of government agents with their own agenda. An unlikely hero, candidly amoral, shunning idealism, Reynolds works for candidates at either side of the political spectrum. At the same time, he possesses a deep if complicated love for his beautiful, unknowable wife; his aging parents; his children. The Lizard is the story of man trapped between a relentless security apparatus and a personal reckoning from which there is no apparent escape. As the tale unfolds ,the differences between the outer world and the inner inexorably dissolve, leading to psychic and physical transformation at once unimaginable and inevitable. The Lizard is forthcoming from Molotov Editions with a release date of May 15. 2025. Two earlier novels, The White Devil and The Confession, winners of Hammett and Edgar Awards, will be re-released at the same time, also from Molotov Editions.

260 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 15, 2025

About the author

Domenic Stansberry is an Edgar Award winning novelist known for his dark, innovative crime novels. His latest novel, The White Devil, tells the story of a young American woman in Rome, an aspiring actress, who— together with her too charming brother— is implicated in a series of crimes dating back to her childhood days in Texas. Stansberry is also the author of the North Beach Mystery Series, which has won wide praise for its portrayal of the ethnic and political subcultures of San Francisco. Books from the series include The Ancient Rain, named several years after its original publication as one of the best crime novels of the decade by Booklist.

An earlier novel, The Confession, received the Edgar Allan Poe Award for its portrayal of a Marin County psychologist accused of murdering his mistress.

Stansberry grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and currently lives in a small town north of that city with his wife, the poet Gillian Conoley, and their daughter Gillis.

Reviews

[Michael Doane · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Lizard is not a comfort read, and it doesn’t want to be. Domenic Stansberry returns to crime fiction with a novel that feels jagged, paranoid, and deeply contemporary a story where political machinery and private moral collapse grind against each other until they become indistinguishable.

S.E. Reynolds is a compellingly compromised protagonist. A former investigative reporter turned political ghostwriter, he operates without illusions, working both sides of the ideological divide while remaining emotionally tethered to family, marriage, and a life he can’t fully reconcile with his choices. That tension gives the novel its pulse.

Stansberry’s prose is lean but hallucinatory, blending conspiracy, noir, and psychological horror. The plot moves with menace rather than momentum, and the sense of dread accumulates slowly, driven as much by Reynolds’ inner unraveling as by the external threat of surveillance and violence.

This is a novel about power, complicity, and the erosion of the self under constant pressure. Darkly funny, disturbing, and intellectually sharp, The Lizard confirms Stansberry’s place as one of the genre’s most fearless and idiosyncratic voices.