The sequel to LOS ANGELES NOIR, an award-winning Los Angeles Times best seller.

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Launched with the summer '04 award-winning best seller 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.

Classic stories by: Raymond Chandler, Paul Cain, James Ellroy, Leigh Brackett, James M. Cain, Chester Himes, Ross MacDonald, Walter Mosley, Naomi Hirahara, Margaret Millar, Joseph Hansen, William Campbell Gault, Jervey Tervalon, Kate Braverman, and Yxta Maya Murray.

From Hollywood starlets to downtown taxi dancers, from Central Avenue speakeasies to clapboard Venice Beach shacks to Depression-era hobos riding the rails, this volume brings you the masters of the genre penning tales of love, lust, and loss in the City of Angels. Some, like Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain, are literary lions. Others, like screenwriters Paul Cain and Leigh Brackett, whose hard-boiled prose shoots like bullets from a bootlegger's gun, have fallen into undeserved obscurity.

What they share is a fascination for the city's dark side, its seedy underbelly of gangsters, starlets, crooked cops, and ordinary folk caught up in Tinseltown's treacherous undertow. Los Angeles isn't only the birthplace of noir, it's the most alluring femme fatale imaginable, dangling glittering wealth and reinvention, sugar-white beaches and palm-front nights. But the writers in this collection, many of whom came west in the 1930s and '40s to toil in Hollywoods Dream Factories, saw how quickly it could all fade into nightmare.

Denise Hamilton (editor) writes the Eve Diamond series and is editor of Los Angeles Noir. Her latest novel, Los Angeles Times best seller The Last Embrace, has been compared to James Ellroy and Raymond Chandler. She lives in Los Angeles.