Boston Noir

Starred review from September 14, 2009
In the best of the 11 stories in this outstanding entry in Akashic's noir series, characters, plot and setting feed off each other like flames and an arsonist's accelerant. These include Lehane's own “Animal Rescue,” about a killing resulting from a lost and contested pit bull; John Dufresne's “The Cross-Eyed Bear,” in which a pedophile priest is caught between the icy representative of the archdiocese and one of his now adult victims; and Don Lee's “The Oriental Hair Poets,” which charts a literary feud that escalates into a police case. Two populations that define the city for outsiders—the elite WASP “Brahmins” and the hundreds of thousands of college students surging through to earn their degrees—appear only in passing. While Lehane expresses the fear in his introduction that Boston is becoming “beiger,” less tribal and gritty and more gentrified and homogenized, this anthology shows that noir can thrive where Raymond Chandler has never set foot.

November 1, 2009
The latest in Akashics noir anthologies focusing on specific citiesthere have been more than 30 of them since the series inception in 2004features 11 original stories, each set in a different Boston neighborhood. In his introduction, editor Lehane calls noir working-class tragedy, which is an apt description of these stories. A woman murders her boss over an oft-promised but never-delivered promotion; a man finds a dog in the garbage, adopts it, and winds up exacting punishment on the dogs abusive former owner; a down-on-his-luck New York musician, forced by his wife to relocate to Boston, finds something very unusual to do to pass the time; a postWorld War II private eye is hired by a beautiful woman whose hidden agenda has unexpected results. The stories, written by Lehane and a host of contributors (including Brendan DuBois, Stewart ONan, and Jim Fusilli), are uniformly solid, with characters, plots, and atmosphere that evoke the classic noirs of Cain, Woolrich, and Thompson.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)