Book Review: DENVER NOIR

Glimpses into the darker side of Denver from fourteen phenomenal writers with ties to the Mile-High City

Image by David Mark from Pixabay

While Denver is known as one of the sunniest cities in the country, it has its fair share of writers who expertly explore the shadows of the noir genre. Luckily for fans of noir short stories, the collection DENVER NOIR (recently published by Brooklyn-based Akashic Books as part of its impressive series of noir anthologies) boasts more than a dozen such scribes, each of whom approaches their art from a unique perspective.

David Heska Wanbli Weiden, author of the novel Winter Counts, opens the collection with “Colfax and Havana.” Named for a busy intersection along the infamous strip that’s the focus of DENVER NOIR’s Part I: The Longest, Wickedest Street, Weiden’s tale features a Native lawyer up against a wall of impossibility that threatens to derail him — and an ending that left this reader imagining what might come next.

Twanna Latrice Hill is involved with two acclaimed Denver institutions as an actor at Phamaly Theatre Company and an instructor at Lighthouse Writers Workshop. Her “A Life of Little Consequence,” set in the Capitol Hill neighborhood, explores just one “edge of a dark world” running through the Mile High City.