Dennis Lehane steps up to the plate as editor and presents a scintillating collection of deep, dark fiction. “Dennis Lehane advises us not to judge the genre by its Hollywood images of sharp men in fedoras lighting cigarettes for femmes fatales standing in the dark alleys . . . [Lehane] writes persuasively of the gentrification that has . . . left people feeling crushed.” ― New York Times  Crime Fiction Column Akashic Books continues its groundbreaking series of original noir anthologies, launched in 2004 with  Brooklyn Noir . Each story is set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the city of the book. Brand-new stories by: Dennis Lehane, Stewart O’Nan, Patricia Powell, John Dufresne, Lynne Heitman, Don Lee, Russ Aborn, J. Itabari Njeri, Jim Fusilli, Brendan DuBois, and Dana Cameron. From the introduction by Dennis Lehane: “Boston is a city that produces guys―or, in the city’s vernacular, knuckleheads―who once stole the replica of a cow that sat in front of a Braintree steak house. The cow weighed what a car weighed, and yet these knuckleheads had the industry to get it onto a pickup truck, drive it back to South Boston, and deposit it in the middle of Broadway. They did this solely so they could then call the Boston Police Department and ask them to respond to a “beef going down on Broadway” . . . So we have our distinct humor and our distinct accent and our distinct vocabulary. All of which―sadly, possibly―is now endangered by progress. Because one can’t ignore that Boston has been beset by a new class war of late, one you’ll see reflected in the stories herein. It’s a war of gentrification. As the city continues to lose its old-school parochialism and overt immigrant tribalism, it’s also losing a lot of its character. Whether that’s a bad thing or a good thing is up for debate, but what can’t be argued is that it is, in fact, happening . . . That’s the paradox of the new Boston―what’s lost has, in many cases, been taken; what’s left is what people can’t sell. Noir is a genre of loss, of men and women unable to roll with the changing times, so the changing times instead roll over them . . .” The latest in Akashic’s noir anthologies focusing on specific cities—there have been more than 30 of them since the series’ inception in 2004—features 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 dog’s 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 post–World 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 O’Nan, and Jim Fusilli), are uniformly solid, with characters, plots, and atmosphere that evoke the classic noirs of Cain, Woolrich, and Thompson. --David Pitt "Dennis Lehane advises us not to judge the genre by its Hollywood images of sharp men in fedoras lighting cigarettes for femmes fatales standing in the dark alleys...[Lehane] writes persuasively of the gentrification that has...left people feeling crushed." --New York Times, November 15, 2009 A Boston Globe Bestseller! DENNIS LEHANE is the author of the Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro mystery series ( A Drink before the War; Darkness, Take My Hand; Sacred; Gone, Baby, Gone; Prayers for Rain; and Moonlight Mile ), as well as  Coronado  (five stories and a play) and the award-winning novels  Mystic River, Shutter Island , and  The Given Day . M ystic River, Shutter Island, and  Gone, Baby, Gone  have been made into award-winning films. He is the editor of  Boston Noir  and coeditor of  Boston Noir 2: The Classics . Used Book in Good Condition