Bronx Noir (Akashic Noir)

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: Jerome Charyn, Lawrence Block, Suzanne Chazin, Terrence Cheng, Pat Picciarelli, Abraham Rodriguez, Kevin Baker, S.J. Rozan, Steven Torres, and others.

From the introduction by S.J. Rozan:

You can’t pack so much yearning, so many people, such a range of everything—income, ethnicity, occupation, land use—into a single borough, even one as big as the Bronx, and not force the kind of friction that slices and sparks. The Bronx has been the home to big-time gangsters—from the Jewish organized crime of Murder Inc. and the Italian Cosa Nostra to the equally organized drug-dealing gangstas of today. The Third Avenue El was a Hopperesque symbol of urban hopelessness; it’s been demolished, but trains on other lines still rumble through the roofscapes of the borough. Prosperity is increasing and drug use is decreasing, but the public housing projects in the Bronx are some of the nation’s largest and remain some of its toughest. Many places in the Bronx seem hidden in shadows, just as the Bronx itself is in Manhattan’s shadow. And dark stories develop best in shadows . . .

S.J. ROZAN was born and raised in the Bronx and is a life-long New Yorker. She’s the author of eight novels in the Lydia Chin/Bill Smith series, the stand-alones Absent Friends and In This Rain, and is the editor of Bronx Noir. Her book Winter and Night won the Edgar, Nero, and Macavity Awards for Best Novel, and was nominated for the Shamus, Anthony, and Barry Awards. Two of her previous books have won the Shamus for Best Novel and another won the Anthony for Best Novel. Her most recent novel is The Mayors of New York.