Rio Noir (Akashic Noir)

“The latest installment of Akashic’s geographically wide-ranging mystery series lands in Rio de Janeiro, a city whose famous imagery—the massive statue of Christ the Redeemer, Sugarloaf mountain, the beautiful beaches—constitutes the public face of the city, but behind lurks a ‘world of shadows, blood, intrigue, violence, hideouts, and mystery’ . . . A good introduction to writers of the region and to the dark side of a very sunny place.” —Booklist

Akashic Books continues its groundbreaking series of original noir anthologies, launched in 2004 with Brooklyn Noir. Each story is set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the city of the book.

Brand-new stories by: Tony Bellotto, Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza, MV Bill, Luiz Eduardo Soares, Guilherme Fiuza, Arthur Dapieve, Victoria Saramago, Arnaldo Bloch, Adriana Lisboa, Alexandre Fraga dos Santos, Marcelo Ferroni, Flávio Carneiro, Raphael Montes, and Luis Fernando Verissimo. All stories translated from Portuguese by Clifford Landers (Coelho’s The Alchemist, etc.).

From the introduction by Tony Bellotto:

“The images of Rio de Janeiro are well known: high rises aligned along white sandy beaches, a blue sea, freshwater lakes, and luxuriant forests that stretch through winding mountains of stone . . . the open arms of Christ the Redeemer blessing a happy, cordial, mixed-race people ever ready to dance a samba or offer a welcoming smile to the tourists who move about in the streets admiring beautiful women shimmying nude atop floats in Carnival parades . . . Opa!

This is not a tourist guide. The city revealed in this book is a different Rio. Even though famous landscapes are present in the pages of Rio Noir, what is exposed here is a world of shadows, blood, intrigue, violence, hideouts, and mystery (and also of humor, of course, as is necessary with any undertaking involving Cariocas) . . . Whether we have succeeded in deciphering an enigma with the dramas of our procurers, card readers, colonels, cops, traffickers, socialites, slum dwellers, embezzlers, tourists, brokers, detectives, journalists, politicians, assassins, editors, outlaws, travelers, coup plotters, writers, lovers, and everyday citizens, I don’t know. But we have surely added a large shadow to the sunny landscape of this wonderful city.”