Toronto Noir
Edited by Janine Armin and Nathaniel G. Moore

This book is the latest addition to Akashic Books' localized-Noir series, which include books such as Brooklyn Noir, Detroit Noir and Paris Noir, among many others.
As you may have guessed by now, the line consists of anthologies of noir stories that share one thing in common: the city in which every story in each particular book takes place. When the Toronto book was announced, I couldn't resist getting it out of curiosity from reading m mystery stories (a genre that I had left behind long ago) set in a very familiar location.
As it usually happens with anthologies, the stories vary wildly between hit and miss; which caused me to be a bit disappointed with the book at one point, since the stories are ordered in such a way that all the stories that weren't to my liking are one right after another. These stories suffered from a few different things but three seemed to be repeated offenses: some were too simplistic, by-the-numbers mystery. The kind of which any mystery fan has read a million while waiting for a flight. Others seemed to be missing the last few pages of the story. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for ambiguous endings to stories, allowing the reader to decide what happened... but there is such a thing as too open-ended: it doesn't take you to a point where the character faces a dilemma and ends right before a decision is made, it seems to end about ten pages before that point. The third and probably most annoying offense would be the writer really, really wanting you to know the story takes place in Toronto, taking the name-dropping of diners, restaurants shops and blurbs about them to a level where it's just too distracting.
Now, I mentioned that all the stories I didn't enjoy were clustered together; the other side of that coin means that all the stories I did enjoy also followed one another. And there are plenty of stories that I enjoyed in the book. Stories that were entertaining (Brianna South,) stories with a (broken) heart (The Emancipation of Christine Alpert, Tom) and just plain good old-fashioned mystery/crime/noir (Can't Buy Me Love, A Taste of Honey, A Bout of Regret, among others.) The good in this book easily outweighs the bad and does a great job at telling compelling stories and embedding them in the fabric of Toronto (without getting to the point where it seems a bit too eager to do so.)