Hamburg Noir

For the latest installment of Akashic’s regional noir series (after Honolulu Noir), CulturBooks publisher Karsten presents a strong collection of 14 stories set on the mean streets of Hamburg, Germany. Highlights include Nora Luttmer’s “Ant Street,” in which a Vietnamese restaurant owner must pay a group of violent extortionists or risk having her business burned down, and Timo Blunck’s gruesome “Angel Fricassee,” in which a sexual encounter takes a gnarly turn. Unlike most other entries in the series, this collection includes a handful of historical stories, most notably Robert Brack’s “Expropriation,” which comprises diary entries by a woman who joins the Hamburg Communist Party in 1922 “to atone for my guilt,” the root of which Brack reveals gradually. In the book’s introduction, Karsten asserts that crime is “an integral, and perennial, element” of Hamburg’s culture. The story most emblematic of this insight is Katrin Seddig’s unsettling “The Assignment,” in which a writer is hired to traverse the city and describe some of its most squalid neighborhoods, leading her to slowly lose her grip on reality. It all adds up to a vivid and memorable portrait of Hamburg’s seedy past and present. (Aug.)