Bright joins the ranks of Akashic editors to rip the lid off the California coastal town that’s never seemed less laid-back.
–Kirkus Reviews

A few [stories] spotlight surfing, a few more feature psycho killers on the loose, and others offer magical overtones.
–Publishers Weekly

Santa Cruz Noir, an electric, wide-ranging collection of short stories edited by local legend Susie Bright, is a book about the paradox of Santa Cruz, the zen and the gunshots, the perfect waves and their broken riders, the million-dollar houses and the flooded homeless encampments. The book is structured from north to south, beginning with tales of bodies not entirely buried on lonely northern beaches and ending in unforgiving agricultural fields to the south. The stories are also grouped into thematic sections, starting with Murder Capital of the World –bloody fever dreams of bad drugs and hitchhiking gone terribly wrong. Fair warning: These stories are as grisly as a good episode of Game of Thrones and just as addictive.
–Bookshop Santa Cruz Newsletter

Akashic Books continues its award-winning series of original noir anthologies, launched in 2004 with Brooklyn Noir. this new volume further reveals the seedy underbelly of the Left Coast.

Brand-new stories by: Tommy Moore, Jessica Breheny, Naomi Hirahara, Calvin McMillin, Liza Monroy, Elizabeth McKenzie, Jill Wolfson, Ariel Gore, Jon Bailiff, Maceo Montoya, Micah Perks, Seana Graham, Vinnie Hansen, Peggy Townsend, Margaret Elysia Garcia, Lou Mathews, Lee Quarnstrom, Dillon Kaiser, Beth Lisick, and Wallace Baine.

From the introduction by Susie Bright:

Every town has its noir-ville. It’s easy to find in Santa Cruz. We live in what’s called paradise, where you can wake up in a pool of blood with the first pink rays of the sunrise peeking out over our mountain range. The dewy mist lifts from the bay. Don’t hate us because we’re beautiful–we were made that way, like Venus rising off the foam with a brick in her hand. We can’t help it if you fall for it every time…

If I lived in a place like this, visitors often say, I’d wake up with a smile every day.

Oh, we do, thank you for that. There’s no beauty like a merciless beauty–and like every crepuscular predator, she thrives at dawn and dusk. You’re just the innocent we’ve been waiting for, with your big paper cone of sugar-shark cotton, whipped out of pure nothing. We have just the ride for you, the longest tunnel ever. Santa Cruz is everything you ever dreamed, and everything you ever screamed, in one long drop you’ll never forget.