Head to your local bookstore on July 6th to pick up the brand-new Akashic city-noir anthology PALM SPRINGS NOIR and get to see a brand-new story from Tod* “A Career Spent Disappointing People” plus new work from Alex Espinoza, Rob Roberge, Rob Bowman, Janet Fitch, T. Jefferson Parker, JD Horn, Michael Craft, and more!
The reviews are already coming in. Here’s Kirkus:
Fourteen tales of dark doings in sunny Palm Springs.
As editor DeMarco-Barrett points out, it’s hard to think “noir” in a landscape that offers 300 days of sunshine a year. But unrelenting heat and light can do funny things to your brain. What else could explain why a longtime karaoke DJ heads south with a trunk full of his partner’s body parts in Tod Goldberg’s “A Career Spent Disappointing People”? Or how a runaway from the Betty Ford Clinic becomes a cat burglar in Eduardo Santiago’s “The Ankle of Anza”? Or how two vacationing college grads get hopelessly lost on a road three miles from the Joshua Tree parking lot in Ken Layne’s “The Loop Trail”? Of course the desert has always been a magnet for the extremes in human behavior. Where else would a group of religious renegades set up camp, as they do in Alex Espinoza’s “The Salt Calls Us Back”? Where else would the CIA conduct the bizarre mind-control experiments Rob Roberge chronicles in “The Expendables”? But even in the extreme Palm Springs climate, the tried-and-true noir motives still stand. There’s money, as in Janet Fitch’s “Sunrise.” There’s the love that goes wrong in Chris J. Bahnsen’s “Octagon Girl” and Kelly Shire’s “A Cold Girl.” There’s the fear that sprouts in J.D. Horn’s “The Stand-In.” And sometimes all three can produce a toxic mix, as they do in DeMarco-Barrett’s “The Water Holds You Still.”
An engaging mix of the good, the bad, and the off-kilter.
Buy it here!
*Well, here’s the thing: It’s actually an early version of the story “The Royal Californian” in The Low Desert. But publication times got reversed, so you’re seeing the early version second. Still, beware of clowns.
