Phoenix Noir

“Patrick Millikin...as if to prove his witty claim that 'sunshine is the new noir,' offers one superb specimen, 'Whiteout on Van Buren,' in which [author] Don Winslow makes skillful use of a city street at high noon to provide the perfect metaphor for life and death.”—New York Times Book Review

Brand-new stories by: Diana Gabaldon, Lee Child, James Sallis, Luis Alberto Urrea, Jon Talton, Megan Abbott, Charles Kelly, Robert Anglen, Patrick Millikin, Laura Tohe, Kurt Reichenbaugh, Gary Phillips, David Corbett, Don Winslow, Dogo Barry Graham, and Stella Pope Duarte.

Patrick Millikin is a bookseller at the Poisoned Pen Bookstore in Scottsdale. As a freelance writer, his articles, interviews, and reviews have appeared in Publishers Weekly, Firsts Magazine, Paradoxa, Yourflesh Quarterly, and other publications. Millikin currently lives in central Phoenix.

From Publishers WeeklyStarred Review. The 16 stories in this stellar volume in Akashic's noir series paint a vivid portrait of the underside of Phoenix, where the gulf between rich and poor ensures [c]rime, and lots of it, as Millikin observes in his introduction. The writers make superb use of locale so that the sprawl, desert, history and especially the heat become characters in their fiction. Among the standouts are Robert Anglen's Growing Back, an unforgettable journey through a prisoner's consciousness, from the hell of his crimes and incarceration to the incestuous bed he shared with his mother; Luis Alberto Urrea's Amapola, in which a teenage lothario makes the possibly fatal mistake of falling for a drug lord's daughter; and Laura Tohe's Tom Snag, an updated version of the Native American shape-shifter myth as visited upon a hammered, horny barfly. Other contributors include Gary Phillips, Don Winslow, Lee Child, James Sallis and Megan Abbott. This book is an absolute must-read for noir fans. (Nov.)

Contents

JON TALTON Downtown Bull

CHARLES KELLY Hassayampa Valley The Eighth Deadly Sin

DIANA GABALDON Desert Botanical Garden Dirty Scottsdale

ROBERT ANGLEN Apache Junction Growing Back

PART II: WHERE THE SIDEWALK ENDS

LUIS ALBERTO URREA Paradise Valley Amapola

LEE CHILD Chandler Public Transportation

PATRICK MILLIKIN Tovrea Castle Christown By the Time He Got to Phoenix

STELLA POPE DUARTE Harmon Park Confession