Santa Cruz noir

Book Cover
Average Rating
Publisher
Akashic Books
Publication Date
[2018]
Language
English

Description

Elizabeth McKenzie's "The Big Creep" has been named a finalist for the 2019 Shamus Award for Best Private Eye Short Story presented by the Private Eye Writers of America!

Lou Mathews's "Crab Dinners" and Dillon Kaiser's "It Follows as it Leads" have been included in the Distinguished Mystery Stories of 2018 list in The Best American Mystery Stories 2019!

"It's a thrilling, whip-smart book that will dazzle local lovers of crime fiction."--Good Times Santa Cruz, Editor's Note

"Santa Cruz is a place of natural beauty, ocean breezes and family-friendly tourist attractions. But a new collection of short fiction stories explores a seedier side of this beach town filled with murder and mystery."--KAZU FM

"Santa Cruz Noir delivers on noir sensibilities with an extra twist: it's that California mythology...It is this noir ethos that defines Santa Cruz Noir. After arriving at California's golden shores, life surely will be better. There is no place further to go."--Book Riot

"Akashic's well-traveled, always-riveting Noir series has been to some serendipitous locales over the years, cities perfectly suited to crime fiction, some boasting a long noir tradition of their very own. But for me, just in terms of sheer allure and possibility, the new Santa Cruz collection is right up there at the top. A washed out seaside pleasure palace, nestled up against the hills and the surf, home to all manner of shady types and societal misfits, proximate to great wealth but possessed of an undeniable scruffiness, and above all, beautiful, with that low California sun so conducive to good noir."--CrimeReads

"Bright joins the ranks of Akashic editors to rip the lid off the California coastal town that's never seemed less laid-back."--Kirkus Reviews

Akashic Books continues its award-winning series of original noir anthologies, launched in 2004 with Brooklyn Noir. Each book comprises all new stories, each one set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the respective city. Following in the footsteps of Los Angeles Noir, San Francisco Noir, San Diego Noir, Orange County Noir, and Oakland Noir, this new volume further reveals the seedy underbelly of the Left Coast.

Brand-new stories by: Tommy Moore, Jessica Breheny, Naomi Hirahara, Calvin McMillin, Liza Monroy, Elizabeth McKenzie, Jill Wolfson, Ariel Gore, Jon Bailiff, Maceo Montoya, Micah Perks, Seana Graham, Vinnie Hansen, Peggy Townsend, Margaret Elysia Garcia, Lou Mathews, Lee Quarnstrom, Dillon Kaiser, Beth Lisick, and Wallace Baine.

From the introduction by Susie Bright:

Every town has its noir-ville. It's easy to find in Santa Cruz. We live in what’s called "paradise," where you can wake up in a pool of blood with the first pink rays of the sunrise peeking out over our mountain range. The dewy mist lifts from the bay. Don't hate us because we're beautiful--we were made that way, like Venus rising off the foam with a brick in her hand. We can't help it if you fall for it every time...

"If I lived in a place like this," visitors often say, "I'd wake up with a smile every day."

Oh, we do, thank you for that. There's no beauty like a merciless beauty--and like every crepuscular predator, she thrives at dawn and dusk. You're just the innocent we've been waiting for, with your big paper cone of sugar-shark cotton, whipped out of pure nothing. We have just the ride for you, the longest tunnel ever. Santa Cruz is everything you ever dreamed, and everything you ever screamed, in one long drop you'll never forget.

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Published Reviews

Publisher's Weekly Review

The 20 tales in this average entry in Akashic's noir series cover the area in and around Santa Cruz, Northern California's surfing capital. A few spotlight surfing, a few more feature psycho killers on the loose, and others offer magical overtones, such as Peggy Townsend's "First Peak," which in a surprise move somehow brings the Hawaii volcano deity Pele to town. Longtime local reporter Lee Quarnstrom's brief "The Shooter" realistically depicts a burst of gunplay in a Watsonville roadhouse decades ago. In Jessica Breheny's "54028 Love Creek Road," an aging teacher makes rent by doing classes at multiple institutions-a tough enough situation even if you didn't have a problem with a gang member who needs a passing grade. A 15-year-old girl detective stars in Elizabeth McKenzie's "The Big Creep," while Jill Wolfson in "Death and Taxes" works a quick Tarantino-esque scenario with a 17-year-old boy spinning a sign for tax work on the street corner. Most of the stories feel unfinished, but some are redeemed by a vibrant edge. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

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Kirkus Book Review

Sexologist Bright (The Best of Best American Erotica, 2008, etc.) joins the ranks of Akashic editors to rip the lid off the California coastal town that's never seemed less laid-back.Considering how small Santa Cruz is, the results here are all over the map except for one invariable rule: Nothing in these 20 new stories goes right. Not the lesbian romance Ariel Gore tracks in "Whatever Happened to Skinny Jane?" Not a community college teacher's attempts to cover for her foundering student in Jessica Breheny's "54028 Love Creek Road." Not the summer-camp friendship Naomi Hirahara develops, then curtails, in "Possessed." Not a college student's search for her missing father, a noted Chinese chef, in Lou Mathews' "Crab Dinners." Not the attempts of sorely tried neighbors to impose the law on their neighborhoods in Micah Perks' "Treasure Island" and Wallace Baine's "Flaming Arrows." Not the doomed romances between moneyed men and the women they pick up in Seana Graham's "Safe Harbor" and Liza Monroy's "Mischa and the Seal," whose heroine gets sage telepathic advice from a seal. Among the strongest entries: An obstreperous 10-year-old interferes when her parents take in a student researcher in Margaret Elysia Garcia's "Monarchs and Maidens"; Elizabeth McKenzie shows a teenage girl whose stint as a private eye gets even shakier when she has to avenge her dead client in "The Big Creep"; an aimless fling suddenly turns nasty in Beth Lisick's "Pinballs"; and a Latino gangster hopes in vain that his son won't follow in his footsteps in Dillon Kaiser's "It Follows Until It Leads."Though many of these stories are more interested in evoking a voice or mood than pursuing a plot to its conclusion, Vinnie Hansen's "Miscalculation" provides a textbook example of how many twists can fit into the simple tale of a bank teller's adventures with the Guitar Case Bandit. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
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Publishers Weekly Reviews

The 20 tales in this average entry in Akashic's noir series cover the area in and around Santa Cruz, Northern California's surfing capital. A few spotlight surfing, a few more feature psycho killers on the loose, and others offer magical overtones, such as Peggy Townsend's "First Peak," which in a surprise move somehow brings the Hawaii volcano deity Pele to town. Longtime local reporter Lee Quarnstrom's brief "The Shooter" realistically depicts a burst of gunplay in a Watsonville roadhouse decades ago. In Jessica Breheny's "54028 Love Creek Road," an aging teacher makes rent by doing classes at multiple institutions—a tough enough situation even if you didn't have a problem with a gang member who needs a passing grade. A 15-year-old girl detective stars in Elizabeth McKenzie's "The Big Creep," while Jill Wolfson in "Death and Taxes" works a quick Tarantino-esque scenario with a 17-year-old boy spinning a sign for tax work on the street corner. Most of the stories feel unfinished, but some are redeemed by a vibrant edge. (June)

Copyright 2018 Publishers Weekly.

Copyright 2018 Publishers Weekly.
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