Santa Cruz Noir

The Akashic Noir series has been steamrolling for years now, exploring the seedy underbelly of big cities and small alike all over the world, allowing each location’s distinctive qualities to shine through the classic noir and crime story tropes that populate each collection. More often than not, each collection feels fresh because the locales are given their moment in the sun.

Santa Cruz Noir is an interesting entry in the series because it’s not a city that seems to evoke a particular idea in the mind of the casual reader, so the collection itself is allowed to build the city’s sense of normalcy, as the reader has no preconceived notions to get in the way.

And so, we get a series of crime stories rich with surf culture in a town loaded with itinerant spirits, typifying Santa Cruz as a place to be lost, or get lost, or lose yourself. That ethos permeates the stories in the collection, granting them an intriguing grittiness that might otherwise be missing.

Concluding with a serious gutpunch of a story, Santa Cruz Noir is a worthy addition to the series, one that proves no locale is too outre for the Akashic Noir treatment.