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Launched by 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 respective city.
"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 Crime Fiction Column, November 15, 2009
Lee Child, Diana Gabaldon, James Sallis, and others reveal how the scalding Arizona sun breeds its own unique blend of noir.
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.
Sunshine is the new noir . . . Phoenix: its name evokes new beginnings, a place to start over fresh, new west rising out of the ashes of the old. From its frontier origins, Phoenix has always had a dark, lawless side. It is a city founded upon shady development deals, good ol' boy politics, police corruption, organized crime, and exploitative use of natural resources. Close proximity to the Mexican border makes the city a natural destination spot for illegal trafficking of all kinds--narcotics, weapons, humans.
Modern-day Phoenix is a textbook case of suburban sprawl gone unchecked. Endless cookie-cutter housing developments, slapped up on the cheap, metastasize outward into the desert. All of the concrete and asphalt traps the heat, raising the temperature to apocalyptic extremes. What does all this mean? Crime, and lots of it.
Best-selling authors such as Diana Gabaldon, Lee Child, Luis Alberto Urrea, and Don Winslow, along with critically acclaimed Phoenix-based luminaries James Sallis, Jon Talton, Stella Pope Duarte, and a host of up-and-coming desert scribes, provide a glimpse into the Valley of the Sun's dark underbelly, a side that the tourists rarely see.
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.
Phoenix Noir
