readandburied | Entries tagged with subgenre: noir

Cover of Piper Deez and the Case of the Winter Planet

Detective Piper Deez, newlywed but still hardboiled, is a solar system away from home investigating murder and thievery on Alta-na-Schell, the Winter Planet. Who can she trust? Who should she trust? Why didn't anyone tell her monogamy was going to be this difficult? Eye of the Storm, a domed city riven by clan rivalries and corruption—with only fingerlengths of shielding protecting its denizens from certain death—may hold some answers and, perhaps, even the end of Piper Deez.

If monogamy doesn't get to her first...

Piper Deez and the Case of the Winter Planet is a hardboiled scifi mystery by M. Fenn; Piper Deez is sent to investigate thefts on a mining planet owned by the clan that she serves, where there are definitely no factions, no bubbling undercurrents of resentment, and only a few murders.

Hello, I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this before, lesbian detective fiction is where I live. Piper Deez and the Case of the Winter Planet was always going to be my jam.

Full review available at The Lesbrary.

[Caution warnings: partner abuse, abuse of power, police harassment, oppression]

spindizzy

Brubaker and Phillips' newest hit series, The Fade Out, is an epic noir set in the world of noir itself, the backlots and bars of Hollywood at the end of its Golden Era. A movie stuck in endless reshoots, a writer damaged from the war and lost in the bottle, a dead movie star and the lookalike hired to replace her. Nothing is what it seems in the place where only lies are true.

I can't tell if The Fade Out is trying to subvert the "starlet dies in Hollywood sleaze" tropes or play them straight. A script writer with PTSD and writers' block - who specifically threw his ghost-writer under the McCarthyism bus - wakes up after a drunken party to find an actress dead next to him. He removes any evidence of his presence, only to find that the murder itself gets covered up, which means that someone else knows and he doesn't know who.

I'll be honest: it made me want to read Angel City again. The art here is fine, and the level of sleaze feels plausibly noir, but after the first chapter I was bored of white men having feelings about dead women. I appreciate that it's probably intended as commentary on how the film industry protects white men from consequences, but that didn't make it any less frustrating to read. It does introduce a female protagonist eventually (who a lot of men have feelings about!), but by that point I was already bored and not in the mood for more stories about gross men trying to take advantage.

Maybe it gets better later, but for me, it wasn't worth the effort.

[Caution warning: murder, abuse, PTSD, racism]

Originally posted at

ladybusiness.

spindizzy

Twenty-one-year-old Madison T. Jackson is already the star of the Emerson College student newspaper when she nabs a coveted night internship at Boston’s premiere newspaper, The Boston Lede. The job’s simple: do whatever the senior reporters tell you to do, from fetching coffee to getting a quote from a grieving parent. It’s grueling work, so when the murder of a prominent Boston businessman comes up on the police scanner, Madison races to the scene of the grisly crime. There, Madison meets the woman who will change her life forever: prominent socialite Dahlia Kennedy, who is covered in gore and being arrested for the murder of her family. The newspapers put everyone they can in front of her with no results until, with nothing to lose, Madison gets a chance – and unexpectedly barrels headfirst into danger she never anticipated.

Gaby Dunn's Bury the Lede revolves around Madison, an intern with plans to become a reporter, whose big break comes when a murderer decides that Madison's the only person that she's going to give information to.

( Read more... )

spindizzy

Bucky Orson is a bit gloomy, but who isn’t at fifteen?

His best friend left him to hang out with way cooler friends, his dad is the town sheriff, and wait for it―he lives in Blackwell, a town where all the girls are witches. But when his little sister is kidnapped because of her extraordinary power, Bucky has to get out of his own head and go on a strange journey to investigate the small town that gives him so much grief. And in the process he uncovers the town’s painful history and a conspiracy that will change it forever.

Grimoire Noir is a fantasy pastiche of noir tropes: Bucky Orson investigates his sister's disappearance in a town where all of the girls
are witches who can't leave. The noir tropes and plot beats are familiar and comfortable, with just enough of a twist from the setting and age of the characters to keep it interesting.

You can read my full review at

ladybusiness.

[Caution warning: witch hunts, historical death of a child, missing child, neglectful parents, child imprisonment]

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Read and Buried

Entries tagged with subgenre: noir

Piper Deez and the Case of the Winter Planet by M. Fenn

The Fade-Out by Ed Brubaker, Sean Phillips, and Elizabeth Breitweiser

Bury the Lede by Gaby Dunn and Claire Roe

Grimoire Noir by Vera Greentea and Yana Bogatch

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March 2021

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