Twin Cities Noir
(Libby/OverDrive eBook)

Minneapolis and St. Paul are the focus of Akashic's ninth anthology in its popular series (Brooklyn Noir, etc.) to marry crime and place. The eclectic group of 15 contributors includes such well-known mystery writers as David Housewright, whose "Mai-Nu's Window" gets the volume off to a strong start, and William Kent Krueger, whose "Bums" is a classic noir tale of folly and futility. A couple of authors manage to create stories that tantalize and give readers something to think about long after the ending. Ellen Hart's "Blind Sided" and Mary Sharratt's "Taking the Bullets Out" both pull off that trick. Gary Bush ("If You Harm Us") and Larry Millett ("The Brewer's Son") reach into the cities' rough and tumble past for their inspiration and turn out entertaining stories of corruption and gangsterism. Steve Thayer's "Hi, I'm God" starts as a gripping tale of young bravado and morphs into an otherworldly farce. Both K.J. Erickson ("Noir Neige") and Judith Guest ("Eminent Domain") show that noir can be humorous and still have bite. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Launched in 2004 with Brooklyn Noir, Akashic's series of regional noir anthologies continues with these welcome eighth and ninth entries. Who better to edit the volume dedicated to Baltimore than Lippman, a former Baltimore Sun reporter whose popular Tess Monaghan series is set in Charm City (also known as "Bulletmore" for its steadfastly high homicide rate)? Lippman also contributes the first and one of the best of the 16 original stories, "Easy as A-B-C," about a contractor who puts his building skills to use when his affair with his client ends. Charlie Stella's on-target dialog spotlights mob efficiency in "Ode to the O's.", while the Fell's Point area is the locale for two tales: Rob Hiassen's "Over My Dead Body," which revolves around the area's gentrification, and Dan Fesperman's "As Seen on TV," in which a Balkan hit man doesn't know that his favorite show, Homicide, which was set here, has long since been cancelled. Other writers include Marcia Talley, Sujata Massey, Tim Cockey, Jim Fusilli, and Homicide author David Simon. Once known as the Saintly City, St. Paul, MN, sheltered criminals on the run during the 1920s and 1930s, and in the mid-1990s Minneapolis was tagged as "Murderapolis" for a rash of killings one summer. So these wholesome Midwestern metropolises have their underside, as several good authors-Pete Hautman, K.J. Erickson, Larry Millett, David Housewright, William Kent Krueger, and Mary Logue-reveal in this collection. A famous writer finds a satisfying means of dealing with the hijacking of her web domain name in Judith Guest's captivating "Eminent Domain," and in Ellen Hart's suspenseful "Blind Sided," a man who's losing his sight comments "You can't go blind in Minnesota without being offered a lot of help-it's the way Minnesotans are." That may explain why these 15 original stories-some dealing with organized crime and less-than-peaceful death-are overall less dark than in the other anthologies reviewed here. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

A collection of 15 new stories most likely to interest denizens of you know where. According to the editors, Minneapolis and St. Paul are home to more than their share of good writers. Maybe so, but the proof of the pudding is not in this particular tasting. It's not that the stories are really bad, except for one or two that are blatantly amateurish; it's just that they run together. You read them, and a minute or two later it's hard to call up the differentiating detail--unless, of course, you have an innate affection for, or a rooting interest in, the Twin Cities. A few entries here do transcend thematic parochialism. Mary Sharratt's "Taking the Bullets Out" is a curious love story about a young woman and a much older man who never touch, never really meet and yet manage to connect in a life-altering way. Peter Hautman's "The Guy" is a grim little number featuring a fed-up wife, a hapless husband and a chilling zinger at the end. Mary Logue's "Blasted" is a deft exercise in the law of unintended consequences. There's good writing and short-story know-how in the submissions by Brad Zellar and Bruce Rubenstein. But those aside, the Twin Cities brand of noir is basically blah. One wonders where this local-interest series (D.C. Noir, 2005, etc.) will end. Newark Noir? Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.