Miami Noir (Akashic Noir)
Sixteen new, diverse and highly entertaining mystery stories pack Akashic's latest city-by-city tour of modern noir, spotlighting the "Miami School," which has sprung to dynamic life in the wake of the legendary Charles Willeford and his signature novelMiami Blues. This anthology prowls through South Beach and across Alligator Alley, hitting every demographic, from long-term Cuban émigrés to Haitian boat people and the garden variety psychopathic redneck. In James W. Hall's "Ride Along," a college professor with an interest in crime writing goes slumming with a thug called Jumpy—"6'4", skinny as a greyhound, pasty-skinned, all knuckles and Adam's apple"—with unexpected results. Vicki Hendricks does a neat deconstruction of classic noir with "Boozanne, Lemme Be," wherein the 4'10" protagonist—"too short for normal chicks, too tall for a dwarf"—lives undetected under a house until he connects with the titular Boozanne and dives still further into ruin. This volume is as solid as the coral rock lying beneath the Miami streets.(Nov.)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.