Maggie Estep found her inspiration for “Alice Fantastic” at Aqueduct Racetrack, the playground of “down-on-their-luck trainers slumping in the benches, degenerates, droolcases and drunks swapping tips,” along with a few professional gamblers like the hard-bitten title character, who pays the price when she drops her guard and lets someone get a little too close.

And then there’s “Animal Rescue,” a work of art by Dennis Lehane. This incisive character study trails after a big lug named Bob, who tends bar in the dodgy Boston neighborhood of Dorchester and discovers the meaning — and the measure — of love when he finds a pit bull puppy beaten and left for dead in a garbage can.

As applied to individual stories, “noir” can be reduced to “tough” or “gritty” or just “not cozy.” But the fierce regional pride that runs through this collection does capture the characters’ fatalistic sense of alienation, even in their own hometowns.

When Bob was a kid, “your parish was your country” and “everything you needed and needed to know was contained within it.” These days, the natives are either feeling trapped or being displaced by strangers. Eloquent variations on this theme are told by forceful writers like George Pelecanos in Washington, D.C., Laura Lippman in Baltimore, Lawrence Block in Hell’s Kitchen and William Kent Krueger on the west side of St. Paul, where an amiable young drifter can’t even hang on to the home he has made on the bank of the river.

You can read the full review at the New York Times review online, or see it in print on Sunday, January 5th, 2014.