Rarely has the City of Light seemed grittier than in this hard-boiled short story anthology, part of Akashic's noir series that began in 2004 with Brooklyn Noir
. The 12 freshly penned pulp fictions by some of France's most prominent practitioners play out in a kind of darker, parallel universe to the tourist mecca; visitors cross these pages at their peril, like the hapless hunk taken captive in Chantal Pelletier's kinky “The Chinese Guy.” As is usual for such volumes, the quality varies considerably among the selections made by Masson, young editor of Gallimard's Série Noire, but it's worth fast-forwarding through the few duds for direct hits like Christophe Mercier's “Christmas,” the poignant tale of a pair of doomed lovers on a snowy night in Pigalle, or Dominique Mainard's “La Vie en Rose,” in which a Piaf-worthy tragedy unfolds amid her old haunts in Belleville. Bull's-eye. (Nov.)
