Kirkus Reviews QR Code
BERKELEY NOIR by Jerry Thompson

BERKELEY NOIR

edited by Jerry Thompson & Owen Hill

Pub Date: May 5th, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61775-797-6
Publisher: Akashic

Sixteen new stories reveal the darker side of friendly, funky Berkeley.

What kind of crime could possibly fester in a town named for an 18th-century British philosopher? Well, there’s academic crime. A prep school tutor helps produce photo-edited porn in Jason S. Ridler’s “Shallow and Deep.” A professor buys a child bride in Summer Brenner’s “Identity Theft.” A high school senior witnesses the abduction of his AP British Literature teacher in Michael David Lukas’ “Dear Fellow Graduates.” Slightly darker is the counterculture crime: Editor Hill in “Righteous Kill” and Shanthi Sekaran in “Eat Your Pheasant, Drink Your Wine” both show what happens when the economically oppressed rise up against their oppressors. In “Lucky Day,” Thomas Burchfield reveals the evil that can come when a well-meaning aide breaks his boss’s cardinal rule never to allow patrons into the library early. A worried mom from Holloway wangles her son a prized place in the Berkeley school district in Aya de León’s “Frederick Douglass Elementary.” And in Nick Mamatas’ “Every Man and Woman Is a Star,” a yoga instructor plays cat and mouse with a deadly adversary. Lucy Jane Bledsoe offers a trip out onto the bay that smacks of desperation in “The Tangy Brine of Dark Night,” but Jim Nisbet’s voyage in “Boy Toy,” although turbulent, is ultimately just a pleasure jaunt. J.M. Curet’s “Wifebeater Tank Top,” the tale with the firmest criminal pedigree, is the most violent, but its poetic language and come-from-nowhere ending make it the best.

The crime without the grime.