New Books: Murder New York Style: Fresh Slices edited by Terrie Moran; Naomi Hirahara

Hi Ed,

Thanks so much for giving me the opportunity to tell the world about the Sisters in Crime New York/Tri-State chapter’s newest anthology, Murder New York Style: Fresh Slices, edited by Terrie Farley Moran.

The twenty-two stories in Fresh Slices take the reader around and about neighborhoods all over the five boroughs of New York City, places that are not usually visited by tourists; and within those places, murder and mayhem reign. Derringer winner Anita Page kicks off the anthology in Gerritsen Beach, Brooklyn and tells about a long ago murder through the eyes of a life long resident in “Tear Down.” While in the final story, “North of Clinton” Edgar and Anthony nominee K.j.a. Wishnia travels east through Queens and plunges us into the lives of day laborers struggling to get by.

Within the pages of Fresh Slices you can hang out with a community of New Yorkers living in a boat basin on the Hudson River; get an insider view of the Russian community in Brighton Beach; or stand on a rise in MacNeil Park overlooking Manhattan as the locals gather on 9/11.

The neighborhood explored in “The Green Market Violinist” by Triss Stein is a small public park which sits on land where in August 1776, British forces under General Howe defeated Revolutionary forces under General Washington during the Battle of Brooklyn. Later the site became the first home of the baseball team that grew to be the Brooklyn Dodgers, when the team was managed by Mister Ebbets himself, long before their true Brooklyn home, Ebbets Field was built.

For a taste of the kinds of odd locations and diverse stories you can expect to find here, click over to Clare Toohey’s story, “A Morbid Case of Identity Theft” which is available online at Criminal Element. The story starts in The Morbid Anatomy Library, “a private research library and collection of curiosities” which sits beside the Gowanus Canal.

On behalf of the anthology authors and all of the members of the Sisters in Crime New York/Tri-State chapter, many thanks to Ed Gorman for allowing us the chance to introduce Fresh Slices. Information about the stories, the authors and book availability is available at Murder New York Style: Fresh Slices. http://www.murdernystyle.com/

Terrie Farley Moran

--------------WEST COAST CRIME WAVE ANTHOLOGY INTERVIEW WITH NAOMI HIRAHARA

Michael Wolf asked each of the authors to share a little bit about themselves, talk a little about the story they contributed to West Coast Crime Wave, and tell us their thoughts about e-books. Today we talk to Edgar award winning author Naomi Hirahara.

Tell us about yourself.

After graduating from college and spending a year in Japan, I worked at a small daily newspaper as a reporter and then editor while taking creative writing classes at UCLA Extension. I don’t know if it was hubris or if I was delusional, but I was committed to being a published novelist someday. Probably what fueled me more than anything was that I felt that I had stories to tell. Not necessary of my life, but of my parents’ experiences and my larger community’s collective experience.

My first mystery, SUMMER OF THE BIG BACHI, took me fifteen years to write and get published. It didn’t start off as a mystery; it evolved into one. I was first attempting to write . a literary novel, but my prose was too simple and straight-forward, just as my journalistic training had taught me. Walking alongside me during this time were mystery authors and their books: Walter Mosley and his Easy Rawlings series, Barbara Neely and her Blanche White series. I began to see a place for my lead protagonist, Mas Arai, an aging Japanese American gardener who had survived the atomic blast in Hiroshima, in a mystery landscape. This turned out to be the perfect container for him, a passive character who needed a high-stakes situation to push him out of his dust-ridden house in Altadena, California.

The third novel in the series, SNAKESKIN SHAMISEN, won an Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Paperback Original. I remember walking back from a post-award party down a Midtown New York City street. It must have been past midnight. The streets were wet and shiny; the rain had ceased for an evening. Mas Arai had made it in New York!

I’ve published four Mas Arai mysteries — three with Random House and one with St. Martin’s. I’ve also had one middle-grade novel published with Random House’s imprint, Delacorte. Before all this, I’ve had a number of nonfiction books published by either small presses/reference publishers or my own press, Midori Books.

for the rest go here:http://mysteryanthology.com/