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A review by tonstantweader
Buenos Aires Noir by Ariel Magnus, Claudia Piñeiro, Elsa Osorio, Maria Ines Krimer, Enzo Maqueira, Pablo De Santis, Alejandro Parisi, Veronica Abdala, Inés Garland, Inés Fernández Moreno, Ernesto Mallo, Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, Alejandro Soifer, Leandro Ávalos Blacha
4.0
Buenos Aires Noir is a new release in the peripatetic Akashic Noir Series that travels the globe, inviting us to spend several hours among the grim and gritty noir landscapes of the cities it visits. With local writers as editors, our “tour guides” are well-informed and have the hometown knowledge to select the best local talent. With fourteen stories, there is a wide variety of short stories for readers to enjoy.
Given Argentina’s violent and grim history with the Peronistas, the Junta, the Dirty War, it is no surprise that this is one of the grimmest anthologies in the series. This is the noir of noir. There is nothing cozy about it. Fury of the Worm by Alejandro Parisi was so disturbing and violent I had to put the book down for a few days.
The Golden Eleventh by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara is a breathless, headlong, poetic race of words that capture the desperate indecision of a man in the midst of committing an atrocity. It is perhaps my favorite story in the anthology even though we are in the mind of a white supremacist terrorist. I loved the slow dawning horror of Crochet by Inés Fernández Moreno. Some of the stories are small, private dramas while others touch on the pain of the Dirty War. Oddly, since I think Mallo did such a great job selecting stories for the anthology, I thought his Eternal Love was the weakest of the collection, more a long joke with a final punchline.
I enjoyed Buenos Aires Noir. That is no surprise, it is one of my favorite publishing series and it seldom disappoints me. If you like armchair travel and mysteries, it combines the best of both. Of course, it’s most traveling the grimmer side of the cities it visits, but it visits most of the neighborhoods, poor, wealthy, traditional, and modern. You see more of a city in these books than you will in Fodor’s.
I received an e-galley of Buenos Aires Noir from Akashic Books through Edelweiss.
Buenos Aires Noir at Akashic Noir
Akashic Noir Series
Ernesto Mallo author site (Spanish language)
Ernesto Mallo on GoodReads
https://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpress.com/2017/11/29/9781617755224/
Given Argentina’s violent and grim history with the Peronistas, the Junta, the Dirty War, it is no surprise that this is one of the grimmest anthologies in the series. This is the noir of noir. There is nothing cozy about it. Fury of the Worm by Alejandro Parisi was so disturbing and violent I had to put the book down for a few days.
The Golden Eleventh by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara is a breathless, headlong, poetic race of words that capture the desperate indecision of a man in the midst of committing an atrocity. It is perhaps my favorite story in the anthology even though we are in the mind of a white supremacist terrorist. I loved the slow dawning horror of Crochet by Inés Fernández Moreno. Some of the stories are small, private dramas while others touch on the pain of the Dirty War. Oddly, since I think Mallo did such a great job selecting stories for the anthology, I thought his Eternal Love was the weakest of the collection, more a long joke with a final punchline.
I enjoyed Buenos Aires Noir. That is no surprise, it is one of my favorite publishing series and it seldom disappoints me. If you like armchair travel and mysteries, it combines the best of both. Of course, it’s most traveling the grimmer side of the cities it visits, but it visits most of the neighborhoods, poor, wealthy, traditional, and modern. You see more of a city in these books than you will in Fodor’s.
I received an e-galley of Buenos Aires Noir from Akashic Books through Edelweiss.
Buenos Aires Noir at Akashic Noir
Akashic Noir Series
Ernesto Mallo author site (Spanish language)
Ernesto Mallo on GoodReads
https://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpress.com/2017/11/29/9781617755224/