Barbara DeMarco-Barrett

As Barbara DeMarco-Barrett says in her introduction, Palm Springs seems an unlikely place for a noir setting: it's bright and sunny year round, with mountains always in the horizon, the desert seemingly ready to take over without warning, and more pools per capita than anywhere else in the United States. But given her definition of noir (maybe the best I've seen)—"the main characters might want their lives to improve and may have high aspirations and goals but they keep making bad choices, show more and things go from bad to worse"—you realize noir is not a place but a state of mind, and thus can be set anywhere. This is the best of the Akashic Noir Series I've read to date, with each story uniquely memorable, some in subtle ways (T. Jefferson Parker), others a sucker punch to the gut (Rob Bowman). You might even say a couple of them (Eric Beetner, Tod Goldberg) are hilarious if you have a very, very dark sense of humor. The more I read this series, the more I love it. Well done, Akashic. Keep 'em coming! show less

Akashic’s noir series of short story collections just keeps getting better and better. In Palm Springs Noir, fourteen stories peel back the sunshine veneer of the desert resort to let us see grit and grime of human nature that noir does so well. Every single story works, and works well.

Palm Springs Noir is the most recent of the Akashic Noir series. Set in the legendary resort city about a hundred miles from Los Angeles. In any resort area, there is always an innate tension between those who visit and those who live there. Usually, the visitors have conspicuous wealth while the townspeople are often living hardscrabble lives in low-paying service jobs that cater to the wealthy who make their homes unaffordable. Palm Springs is no different and that tension infuses several show more of the short stories in this fabulous new issue in the series.

Barbara DeMarco-Barrett, who edited Palm Springs Noir contributed one of her own stories, a diabolical case of sibling rivalry and the attentions of one of those service workers, the one who cleans the pool. She also wrote one of the shortest introductions ever and I am so grateful. She manages to define noir and how it has changed over time as well as give us a capsule history of Palm Springs and its society all in five pages. Well done!

There are fourteen stories and not a stinker among them. I thought “The Salt Calls You Back” to be particularly chilling. “The Expendables” is a perfect fit for our Qonspiracist era despite being set in 1981. “VIP Check-In” is another perfect little story .

Palm Springs Noir is an outstanding collection of noir short stories. I cannot tell you how much I love it when editors focus their innovations on finding more diverse voices and characters rather than trying to redefine noir. I love it when editors show they understand the noir aesthetic is already deep and wide and does not need to be elevated. This is an excellent collection and I came away feeling like I understood Palm Springs better than I could if there were a “Real Housewives of Palm Springs” series.

I received a copy of Palm Springs Noir from the publisher through LibraryThing.

Palm Springs Noir at Akashic Books
Barbara Demarco-Barrett author site
Akashic Noir Series

https://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpress.com/2021/07/18/palm-springs-noir-by-barb... show less

It pains me to write this review. I’ve read many Akashic Noir collections, and I've loved the vast majority of them. As with most short story anthologies, the stories are a mixed bag ranging from terrible to amazing, with most falling somewhere in the good to great categories. Out of the typical 14 stories in each collection, there are usually one or two I really dislike, and a handful of gorgeous standouts, while I enjoy the rest. Palm Springs Noir is, sadly, an outlier. To me, the show more majority of the stories were poorly paced, ridiculously plotted, and capped off with bad endings. There were a couple that I thought were brilliant: The Expendables by Rob Roberge and The Stand-In by J.D. Horn being my favorites. Barbara DeMarco-Barrett’s The Water Holds You Still and Alex Espinoza’s The Salt Calls Is Back, were also good. I really appreciated the creepy atmosphere of Espinoza’s tale and the surprising ending. The rest were either boring and unremarkable, or like The Loop Trail by Ken Layne, ended so badly that they actually made me mad. If The Loop Trail had ended two pages sooner, I'd have loved it. As it is, I'd really like the 5 hours of my life back that I spent reading this collection.

I’m grateful to Akashic Books and LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers program for the free advanced copy in exchange for my honest review. All opinions are purely my own. show less