From Publishers Weekly
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 novel
Miami 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.
Product Description
Brand-new stories by: James W. Hall, Barbara Parker, John Dufresne, Paul Levine, Carolina Garcia-Aguilera, Tom Corcoran, Christine Kling, George Tucker, Kevin Allen, Anthony Dale Gagliano, David Beaty, Vicki Hendricks, John Bond, Preston Allen, Lynne Barrett, and Jeffrey Wehr.
From the introduction by Les Standiford:
The truth is that Miami, though naturally lovely, is a frontier town, perched on the border between the known and the rarely before experienced . . . We are not only on the edge of the continent, we are to this country what New York was in Ellis Island's heyday, what the West Coast was in the middle of the 20th century. This is where the new arrivals debark these days, and it is no mistake that during the last decade of the last century, commentators as diverse as Joan Didion, David Rieff, and T.D. Allman devoted entire volumes to Miami's role as the harbinger for America's future . . . But for now, the novel of crime and punishment is the perfect vehicle to convey the spirit and the timbre of this brawling place to a wider world.
