The good Samaritan / Charles Ardai -- The last supper / Carol Lea Benjamin -- If you can't stand the heat / Lawrence Block -- Rain / Thomas H. Cook -- A nice place to visit / Jeffrey Deaver -- The next best thing / Jim Fusilli -- Take the man's pay / Robert Knightly -- The laundry room / John Lutz -- Freddie Prinze is my guardian angel / Liz MartΓnez -- The organ grinder / Maan Meyers -- Why do they have to hit? / Martin Meyers -- Building / S.J. Rozan -- The most beautiful apartment in New York / Justin Scott -- The last round / C.J. Sullivan -- Crying with Audrey Hepburn / Xu Xi.;Mystery writing titan Lawrence Block takes a bite into Manhattan crime. Brand new crime fiction stories from Jeffery Deaver, Lawrence Block, Charles Ardai, Carol Lea Benjamin, Thomas H. Cook, Jim Fusilli, Robert Knightly, John Lutz, Liz Martinez, Maan Meyers, Martin Meyers, S.J. Rozan, Justin Scott, C.J. Sullivan, and Xu Xi. Readers of Brooklyn Noir will recall that its contents were labeled by neighborhood?Bay Ridge, Canarsie, Greenpoint, etc. We have chosen the same principle here, and the book's contents do a good job of covering the island, from C.J. Sullivan's Inwood and Charles Ardai's Upper East Side, to Justin Scott's Chelsea and Carol Lea Benjamin's Greenwich Village. The range in mood and literary style is at least as great; noir can be funny, it can stretch to include magic realism, it can be ample or stark, told in the past or present tense, and in the first or third person. I wouldn't presume to define noir?if we could define it, we wouldn't need to use a French word for it--but it seems to me that it's more a way of looking at the world than what one sees.