Mystery/Fiction Anthology
A Trade Paperback Original
ISBN-13: 978-1-61775-074-8
e-ISBN: 978-1-61775-117-2
288 pages | $15.95
*Forthcoming: June 2012

Following in the Caribbean footsteps of Haiti Noir and Trinidad Noir, now come dark stories from Jamaica's capital city.

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Original stories by: Marlon James, Kwame Dawes, Patricia Powell, Chris Abani, Marcia Douglas, Leone Ross, Kei Miller, Christopher John Farley, Ian Thomson, Thomas Glave, and Colin Channer.

Launched with the summer '04 award-winning best seller Brooklyn Noir, Akashic Books continues its groundbreaking series of original noir anthologies. Each book is comprised of all-new stories, each one set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the geographical area of the book.

FROM TRECH TOWN TO HALF WAY TREE to Norbrook to Portmore and beyond, the stories of Kingston Noir shine light into the darkest corners of this fabled city. Joining award-winning Jamaican authors such as Marlon James, Leone Ross, and Thomas Glave are two "special guest" writers with no Jamaican lineage: Nigerian-born Chris Abani and British writer Ian Thomson. The menacing tone that runs through some of these stories is counterbalanced by the clever humor in others, such as Kei Miller's "white gyal with a camera," who softens even the hardest of August Town's gangsters; and Mr. Brown, the private investigator in Kwame Dawes's story, who explains why his girth works to his advantage: "In Jamaica a woman like a big man. She can see he is prosperous, and that he can be in charge." Together, the outstanding tales in Kingston Noir comprise the best volume of short fiction ever to arise from the literary wellspring that is Jamaica.

Colin Channer's books include the novel Waiting in Vain, a critic's choice selection of the Washington Post, and the novella The Girl with the Golden Shoes. His other writings have appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Times Literary Supplement. Born in Kingston, Jamaica, he has lived in the U.S. since the early 1980s. He's the editor of the fiction anthology Iron Balloons, and coeditor with Kwame Dawes of the poetry anthology So Much Things to Say.