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Queens Noir
edited by Robert Knightly

Mystery/Fiction Anthology | A Trade Paperback Original
ISBN-13: 978-1-933354-40-8 l 350 pages | $15.95
Forthcoming: January 2008




Click here to see more titles in the Akashic Noir Series.

Launched by 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.

On the heels of Brooklyn, Manhattan, and the Bronx, the borough of Queens enters the chambers of noir.

See below for full table of contents.

All-new stories by: Denis Hamill, Maggie Estep, Megan Abbott, Robert Knightly, Liz Mart’nez, Jill Eisenstadt, Mary Byrne, Tori Carrington, Shailly P. Agnihotri, k.j.a. Wishnia, Victoria Eng, Alan Gordon, Beverly Farley, Joe Guglielmelli, and Glenville Lovell.

Queens used to be dismissed as the "bedroom of Manhattan"--daily disgorging its sons and daughters by elevated rail and the Queensboro Bridge to their jobs in "New York" (as Manhattan was known to us in the outer boroughs). By 2007, Queens had become the borough of immigrants--2.2 million residents, forty-eight percent of whom are foreign-born, the vast majority of them Asian. In fifty-plus distinct neighborhoods, speaking 140 different languages, reside: Chinese, Koreans, Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Guyanese, Jamaicans, Haitians, Trinidadians, Colombians, Ecuadorians, Dominicans, Mexicans, Filipinos, not to mention Greeks.

Queens county is the largest borough accommodating two beaches, two airports, Aqueduct Racetrack, three elevated train structures, and Shea Stadium. Queens Noir has set twenty original crime stories in the neighborhoods and at the "Big A," Shea Stadium, JFK Airport, Rockaway Beach, and aboard the elevated Flushing 7 subway line.

Robert Knightly relocated from Manhattan to Jackson Heights, Queens in 1994 (marriage and a bigger apartment). He spent his first forty-four years in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, just a hop, skip, and a jump over the Pulaski Bridge spanning Newtown Creek between Greenpoint and Long Island City, Queens. He works as a criminal trial lawyer for the Legal Aid Society in the Queens Criminal Court in Kew Gardens. Once upon a time, he was a New York City policeman, but that was in big, bad Brooklyn.



Table of Contents

Introduction

Part I: Queens on the Fly: By Sea, Horse, Train, Plane, and Silver Screen
"Alice Fantastic" by Maggie Estep (Aqueduct Racetrack)
"Under the Throgs Neck Bridge" by Denis Hamill (Bayside)
"Golden Venture" by Jill Eisenstadt (The Rockaways)
"Buckner's Error" by Joseph Guglielmelli (Shea Stadium)
"Baggage Claim" by Patricia King (JFK Airport)
"Arrivederci, Aldo" by Kim Sykes (Long Island City)

Part II: Old Queens
"Hollywood Lanes" by Megan Abbott (Forest HIlls)
"Only the Strong Survive" by Mary Byrne (Astoria)
"First Calvary" by Robert Knightly (Blissville)
"Bottom of the Sixth" by Alan Gordon (Rego Park)
"The Flower of Flushing" by Victoria Eng (Flushing)
"Crazy Jill Saves the Slinky" by Stephen Solomita (College Point)
"Last Stop, Ditmars" by Tori Carrington (Ditmars)

Part III: Foreign Shores
"Avoid Agony" by Shailly Agnihotri (Jackson Heights)
"Viernes Loco" by K.j.a. Wishnia (Corona)
"Out of Body" by Glenville Lovell (South Jamaica)
"Lights Out for Frankie" by Liz Martinez (Woodside)
"Jihad Sucks: or, The Conversion of the Jews" by Jillian Abbott (Richmond Hill)
"The Investigation" by Belinda Farley (Jamaica)