Dennis Lehane returns to coedit, with Cotton & Clarke, the sequel to the best-selling evergreen anthology Boston Noir, culling classic stories from the city’s dark literary legacy.

“The contributor list is delightfully quirky . . . The collection’s unifying element is a deep understanding of Boston’s Byzantine worlds of race and class—as seen terrifyingly in Andre Dubus’s tale of mill town resentment and pampered preppies.” —Boston Globe

Featuring stories by: Linda Barnes, Jason Brown, Andre Dubus, Chuck Hogan, George Harrar, George V. Higgins, Dennis Lehane, Joyce Carol Oates, Robert B. Parker, David Ryan, Kenneth Abel, Barbara Neely, Hannah Tinti, and David Foster Wallace.

From the introduction by Jaime Clarke, Mary Cotton, & Dennis Lehane:

“What is noir and what is not inhabits a gray area. Its definition is continually expanding from the previous generation’s agreed-upon notion that noir involves men in fedoras smoking cigarettes on street corners. Noir alludes to crime, sure, but it also evokes bleak elements, danger, tragedy, sleaze, all of which is best represented by its root French definition: black. We used this idea as our guide for this sequel to the best-selling Boston Noir anthology . . .

"The commonwealth is an endless source of fascinating landscapes: the autumnal light spreading across the Charles River; the ice floes in the wintry Boston Harbor; a spring air tantalizing leaves in Harvard Yard; the salty taste of summer as sunbathers peer into the horizon, shielding their eyes from the glare, squinting into the middle distance. Beyond the postcard fabric, though, lies a community populated by broken families, criminal minds, voyeurs, and outsiders. They look like you and me. These are their stories.”