San Diego Noir
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
Southern California is not all sun, sand, and surf in this gripping collection of noir tales from T. Jefferson Parker, Don Winslow, Maria Lima, and others.
San Diego is home to miles of beaches, Balboa Park, a world-famous zoo, and some of the country's most expensive home and resort real estate. Yet the city also houses a few items that aren't actively promoted by the visitor's bureau: a number of the country's most corrupt politicians, border-related crimes, terrorists, and the occasional earthquakes. A noir feast!
In the fifty-plus years since Raymond Chandler set Playback in Esmeralda, his name for La Jolla, the population has grown by more than a million, and crime has proliferated as well. San Diego of the past and the present offers the book's contributors a rich selection of settings, from the cross on Mount Soledad to the piers of Ocean Beach, and perpetrators and victims from the residents of its wealthiest enclaves to the inhabitants of its segregated barrios.
San Diego Noir includes stories by T. Jefferson Parker, Jeffrey J. Mariotte, Martha C. Lawrence, Diane Clark & Astrid Bear, Debra Ginsberg, Morgan Hunt, Ken Kuhlken, Taffy Cannon, Don Winslow, Cameron Pierce Hughes, Lisa Brackmann, Gabriel R. Barillas, Gar Anthony Haywood, Luis Alberto Urrea, and Maria Lima.
"When it's done right, noir is a darkly delicious thrill: smart, sharp-tongued, surprising. The knife goes in at the end with a twist. San Diego Noir, a new 15-story collection by some of the region's best writers, has all that going for it, and the steady supply of hometown references makes it even more fun." —The San Diego Union-Tribune
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
San Diego, Calif., calls itself "America's Finest City," but apparently it's not "America's Finest City for Noir Fiction," if this uneven anthology is any guide. Perhaps the best entry is T. Jefferson Parker's character-driven "Vic Primeval," about a stripper/hooker and the poor sap who falls for her. Another standout is Don Winslow's "After Thirty," about a "hard case," sailor Charlie Decker, on leave in San Diego in the closing days of WWII. The characters feel real, and the story has a neat, ironic twist at the end. Also notable is Cameron Pierce Hughes's "Moving Black Objects," a grungy exploration of San Diego's underside by a character who will surprise the reader. But most of these 15 stories are subpar, with too much local color and too little plot and not nearly enough of a noir sensibility.
