Montana Noir

Thirteen original stories plus a reprint by Thomas McGuane (“Motherlode”) cover the Big Sky State in this thoroughly entertaining Akashic anthology, from desperate writing students in Missoula (Gwen Florio’s “Trailer Trash”) to a van of itinerant strippers working the Hi-Line paralleling the Canadian border (Grady’s “The Road You Take”). Other stories touch on the history of the Gros Ventre tribe and the Flathead Nation (Debra Magpie Earling’s “Custer’s Last Stand” and Sidner Larson’s “Dark Monument”). In Keir Graff’s timely “Red Skies of Montana,” an immigrant from Mumbai is babysitting the site of a ski lodge when arsonists arrive to burn it to the ground. Most of the tales have stronger starts than finishes, and the appearance of a Private Chandler Marlowe (from the Iraq conflict) in David Abrams’s “Red, White, and Butte” is cute enough to be distracting. Yvonne Seng’s “All the Damn Stars in the Sky” probably isn’t true noir, but provides the most fun, with ex-circus performers, abandoned missile silos, and a chopper from Fox News in the mix. (Sept.)