Honolulu Noir

The Aloha State enters the Akashic Noir Series arena with a riveting collection, exploring shadows and corners of Honolulu that will never be found in a tourist brochure

Two thousand miles away from the rest of the country, an American city evades the mind''s eye of the empire that claimed it, peddled it as paradise, then largely ignored it. And yet, Honolulu likes its anonymity. Tourists and outsiders corral themselves in hotels and resorts, vacation eyes glued to their beachfront sunsets and mai tais while the people who live here get on with their affairs. And sometimes it''s dirty business. Honolulu Noir comprises stories about the people of the city, written by those who know this place best. The volume opens with a story featuring Chang Apana, the Native Hawaiian/Chinese real-life cop who was the inspiration for the controversial Charlie Chan. It ends with a supernatural journey from the Philippines to Hawaii. In between, readers will find multicultural tales of invasion (whether yakuza, ISIS recruiters, or vampires), madness, addiction, and murder - all the stuff that many people don''t know happens here. Unbeknownst to the rest of the country, Honolulu can be a very dangerous place. Here, even the alluring crystal-blue waters might kill you. Chris McKinney says, ''When the opportunity to edit Honolulu Noir was presented to me, I jumped at the chance. I''d been aware of the outstanding reputation of Akashic''s Noir Series, and as someone who was born and has lived and worked in just about every neighborhood in this city, I felt up to the task.'' E komo mai to Honolulu Noir.

Brooklyn NoirBrand-new stories by: From the introduction by Chris McKinney:When one thinks of Honolulu, I’m sure ‘noir’ is not the first word to pop into one’s mind. Instead, one thinks surfing and hula—white sandy beaches and crystal-blue waters . . . Yet we do have our problems. To this day, Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders are disproportionately incarcerated and victims of poverty in a place where the average cost of a single-family home has skyrocketed to a million dollars. It’s not uncommon for four generations of a family to live in the same house. Drugs, homelessness, child abuse, and sex trafficking are pervasive . . .I was excited to be tasked with editing this anthology because the setting of Honolulu for the purposes of noir is and always has been full of possibility. Wherever crime, poverty, and corruption exist, noir is easy, and despite its glossy reputation, Honolulu has all these things. On top of that, I’m betting this will be one of the most diverse anthologies in Akashic Books’s impressively popular and abundant collection . . . We all mostly get along in this city in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, about 2,500 miles from the closest continent. And when we don’t? Well, you can read all about it here in