Berkeley Noir

March 2, 2020
The 16 stories set in Berkeley, Calif., in this above average Akashic noir anthology offer little actual noir but a heaping helping of crime, with almost every entry featuring at least a murder or kidnapping. Highlights include Barry Gifford’s brief but effective “Barroom Butterfly,” a riff on true crime magazines, and Lexi Pandell’s unsettling “Hill House,” in which a journalism grad student house-sits for a famous UC Berkeley professor. In Lucy Jane Bledsoe’s tense “The Tangy Brine of the Dark Night,” a young woman paddles a kayak onto San Francisco Bay to give her dead grandmother a furtive watery burial. Jim Nisbet in “Boy Toy” takes to the bay in a sailboat, but drowns his narrative in more nautical jargon than Moby-Dick. One of the most entertaining selections, Michael David Lukas’s “Dear Fellow Graduates,” takes the form of a high school student’s graduation address that focuses on a teacher’s kidnapping. Readers will be glad that many of these tales are fun in a way that traditional noir isn’t.

March 1, 2020
Sixteen new stories reveal the darker side of friendly, funky Berkeley. What kind of crime could possibly fester in a town named for an 18th-century British philosopher? Well, there's academic crime. A prep school tutor helps produce photo-edited porn in Jason S. Ridler's "Shallow and Deep." A professor buys a child bride in Summer Brenner's "Identity Theft." A high school senior witnesses the abduction of his AP British Literature teacher in Michael David Lukas' "Dear Fellow Graduates." Slightly darker is the counterculture crime: Editor Hill in "Righteous Kill" and Shanthi Sekaran in "Eat Your Pheasant, Drink Your Wine" both show what happens when the economically oppressed rise up against their oppressors. In "Lucky Day," Thomas Burchfield reveals the evil that can come when a well-meaning aide breaks his boss's cardinal rule never to allow patrons into the library early. A worried mom from Holloway wangles her son a prized place in the Berkeley school district in Aya de Le�n's "Frederick Douglass Elementary." And in Nick Mamatas' "Every Man and Woman Is a Star," a yoga instructor plays cat and mouse with a deadly adversary. Lucy Jane Bledsoe offers a trip out onto the bay that smacks of desperation in "The Tangy Brine of Dark Night," but Jim Nisbet's voyage in "Boy Toy," although turbulent, is ultimately just a pleasure jaunt. J.M. Curet's "Wifebeater Tank Top," the tale with the firmest criminal pedigree, is the most violent, but its poetic language and come-from-nowhere ending make it the best. The crime without the grime.

COPYRIGHT(2020) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

April 1, 2020
Berkeley, California: home of a world-class university with a parking lot for Nobel laureates, politically active and correct, volatile, and, yes, a bit seedy, too, if you know where to look. The stories in Akashic's latest noir anthology expose the underbelly of this lovely city. Each is set in a different neighborhood or location, from the campus to the marina, from the Gourmet Ghetto to the flats, and the authors capture the atmosphere of each locale, featuring characters who represent the city's diverse population. There is little overt violence, but ironic plot twists and betrayals are in abundance. Sixteen authors, among them Susan Dunlap, Michael David Lukas, Barry Gifford, and Aya de Le�n, offer engaging stories with perps committing everything from plagiarism to murder. As one cop states, Karma is the one law citizens in Berkeley respect. All get their just rewards eventually, and readers will be entertained as they find out how it happens.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)