Brand-new stories by: Thomas Adcock, Kevin Baker, Thomas Bentil, Lawrence Block, Jerome Charyn, Suzanne Chazin, Terrence Cheng, Ed Dee, Joanne Dobson, Robert Hughes, Marlon James, Sandra Kitt, Rita Laken, Miles Marshall Lewis, Pat Picciarelli, Abraham Rodriguez Jr., S.J. Rozan, Steven Torres, and Joe Wallace. As any Bronxite will tell you, being from Da Bronx is a permanent condition, no matter where you end up... For a time in the '70s and '80s, the name was synonymous (to non-Bronxites) with a vast urban maelstrom of lawlessness and decay. But the place was always more complicated than that. There's the Bronx Zoo, the Botanical Garden, universities, Yankee Stadium, grand estates, squalid housing projects, the sinking Concourse, and nautical City Island... The writers represented in Bronx Noir know the borough so well that, reading the book, you'll smell it, feel it, see it, hear it. The sights and scents will be multitudinous and as distinct as the neighborhoods. And everyone of them, in all their glorious mutual contradiction, is the Bronx

Brooklyn Noir is back, this time with a true-crime vengeance. Akashic Books continues its award-winning series of original noir anthologies, launched in 2004 with Brooklyn Noir. This volume presents the first nonfiction collection in the series, curated by acclaimed novelists Tim McLoughlin and Thomas Adcock. Brand-new stories by: Robert Leuci, Dennis Hawkins, Tim McLoughlin, Thomas Adcock, Errol Louis, Denise Buffa, Patricia Mulcahy, C. J. Sullivan, Reed Farrel Coleman, Aileen Gallagher, Christopher Musella, Kim Sykes, Robert Knightly, Jess Korman, Constance Casey, and Rosemarie Yu

XMAS MARKS THE PLOT Twelve Christmas mysteries — gift wrapped in entertainment and suspense — ready to take home for the holidays in this delightful collection selected from Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Margery Allingham’s Albert Campion, British detective extraordinaire, solves a country killing in which delivering a Christmas card was simply murder. Rex Stout sends a crotchety patrolman out to investigate a yuletide jewel theft on Manhattan’s mean streets. John D. MacDonald leaves us a secretary’s corpse on Christmas Street along with a cop’s clever ruse to catch her killer. And Santa Claus himself hitches up a sleighload of chills in stories by George Baxt, Malcolm McClintick, James Powell, and many more... for it’s ho, ho, homicide in the season to guess whodunit. MYSTERY FOR CHRISTMAS

Brand-new stories by: Ace Atkins, Laura Lippman, Patty Friedmann, Barbara Hambly, Tim McLoughlin, Olympia Vernon, David Fulmer, Jervey Tervalon, James Nolan, Kalamu ya Salaam, Maureen Tan, Thomas Adcock, Jeri Cain Rossi, Christine Wiltz, Greg Herren, Julie Smith, Eric Overmyer, and Ted O’Brien. [A portion of the profits from New Orleans Noir will be donated to Katrina KARES, a hurricane relief program sponsored by the New Orleans Institute that awards grants to writers affected by the hurricane.] New Orleans is a third world country in itself, a Latin, African, European (and often amoral) culture trapped in a Puritan nation. It’s everyone’s seamy underside, the city where respectable citizens go to get drunk, puke in the gutter, dance on tabletops, and go home with strangers, all without guilt. It’s the metropolitan equivalent of eating standing up — if it happened in New Orleans, it doesn’t count. The city was always the home of the lovable rogue, the poison magnolia, the bent politico, the sociopathic street thug, and, especially, the heartless con artist — but in post-Katrina times it struggles against... well, the same old problems, just writ large and with a new breed of carpetbagger thrown in. Combine all that with a brilliant literary tradition and you have New Orleans Noir, a sparkling collection of tales exploring the city’s wasted, gutted neighborhoods, its outwardly gleaming “sliver by the river,” its still-raunchy French Quarter, and other hoods so far from the Quarter they might as well be on another continent. It also looks back into the past, from that recent innocent time known in contemporary New Orleans as “pre-K,” to the mid-nineteenth century, the other time the city was mostly swampland