Tampa Bay Noir

Bland varieties of domestic and sexual abuse, hate crimes, lost loves, and past dalliances that come home to roost in the form of revenge murders mark many of the 15 entries in this routine Akashic noir anthology centered on Tampa Bay, Fla. In one of the volume’s better tales, Michael Connelly’s intriguing “The Guardian,” an artist summons retired LAPD homicide detective Hieronymus Bosch, an ex-lover of hers, to investigate the theft of one of her most valuable paintings. The clueless house-flipper in Lori Roy’s “Chum in the Water,” the sex mad college professor in Karen Brown’s “I Get The Same Old Feeling,” and the cookie-cutter family of transplants meeting misfit neighbors in Tim Dorsey’s “Triggerfish Lane” all offer familiar victims of standard motives. Most stories fizzle out with reprehensible, unstable characters, predictable plots, and obvious solutions. This area of Florida may be a “native habitat” for “theft, debauchery, and violence,” as noted in the introduction, but readers should be prepared for a petri dish of noir lite. (Aug.)