Iced: The New Noir Anthology of Cold, Hard Fiction

Jerremie Clyde is a reference librarian at the University of Alberta.

Iced consists of 16 short stories of crime, deceit, and selfishness,
that feature characters that are refreshingly dark, dirty, foolish, and
real. This is crime fiction without the mystery, or at least without the
sleuth to provide a happy ending. All the stories are excellent, but
two—“Avenging Miriam” by Peter Sellers and “The Duke” by Eric
Wright—are standouts.

“Avenging Miriam” is the tale of a professional hit-man who is
contracted by a man fed up with the Canadian justice system to kill a
group of nine teenagers who beat one of their classmates to death. In
the process of slowly hunting down the teens, the hit-man struggles with
what even to him seems like an inexplicable and senseless crime. The
reader can’t help but share the hit-man’s own deep need to
understand what the teens could have been thinking. In “The Duke,”
the reader is transported to a logging camp in the north. The story is
about the camp’s cook, Duke Luscombe, who has a run-in with one of the
loggers. The logger decides to make Duke the brunt of his practical
jokes. Saying anything more would give too much away. This is the kind
of tale one expects to hear around a campfire, a story that should be
part of the Canadian consciousness.

Sellers is an award-winning writer and the editor of a critically
acclaimed anthology series, Cold Blood. Schooley has been published in
numerous literary magazines. This collection has much to offer not only
fans of noir fiction, but readers who normally favor other genres.