Launched with the summer '04 award-winning bestseller Brooklyn Noir,
Akashic Books continues its groundbreaking series of original noir
anthologies. Each book is comprised of all-new stories, each one set in
a distinct neighborhood or location within the city of the book.
Los Angeles Times book critic David L. Ulin has been vacationing in
Cape Cod every summer since he was a boy. He knows the terrain inside
out; enough to identify the squalid underbelly of this allegedly idyllic
location. His editing prowess is a perfect match for this fine volume.
From the introduction by David L. Ulin: "For me, Cape Cod is a
repository of memory: forty summers in the same house will do that to
you. But it is also a landscape of hidden tensions, which rise up when
we least anticipate. In part, this has to do with social aspiration,
which is one of the things that brought my family, like many others, to
the Cape. In part, it has to do with social division, which has been a
factor since at least the end of the nineteenth century, when then
summer trade began. There are lines here, lines that get crossed and
lines that never get crossed, the kinds of lines that form the web of
noir. Call it what you want--summer and smoke is how I think of it--but
that's the Cape Cod at the center of this book."
