Distinct from the Noir genre in film, Noir fiction is often as dark as the name implies. No cherished heroes for protagonists are to be found here. Instead, these are stories of the fallen and the flawed. Noir fiction blurs the lines of right and wrong, emphasizing just how large the gray areas are in the choices their characters make. A subgenre of crime fiction, Noir fiction can run the gamut from violent, haunting, gritty, to darkly humorous; fans of Winter's Bone may find they're fans of these reads as well. This list contains Noir and Rural Noir selections. Selected and curated by SJPL Librarians.
All of them are fleeing something. Growing up without a father, Hana’s tired of the pity in her classmates’ eyes, and finds a flashier mother figure in Kimiko. Kimiko is older than Hana's mother but seems much younger, chatting easily about school…
It’s 1974 and San Francisco is full of mystery and menace. Nineteen-year-old Celia Dent keeps telling herself how lucky she is to be married to Drew, a man who says he loves her. But Celia’s contentment with her little life is shattered when a woman…
Carla, a single mom poised to finally break free from her cycle of poverty, must risk it all, including her morality, to help her son hide a terrible secret.
Reed, an autistic young man, sets out on a journey to keep a deathbed promise to the…
When eldest son Roman Carruthers is summoned home to Jefferson Run, Virginia after his father’s car accident, he finds his younger brother, Dante, in debt to dangerous criminals and his sister, Neveah, exhausted from holding the family—and the…
When three sleazy gangsters storm into an apartment in search of a stolen urn, they set off a series of unfortunate events that threatens everyone in the building. As blood begins to pool, it becomes clear that this story is about more than the…
Chicky Diaz, beloved doorman at the Bohemia - a world-famous apartment housing celebrities and elites - prepares for an eventful night as tensions rise across the city. In the penthouse, Emily Longworth grapples with her loathsome yet immensely…
Sam Monroe thought his affair with Laura Nielson was over, but when she didn’t show up after unexpectedly asking to meet, he investigates. He finds her strangled, his dog tags wrapped around her neck. Sam's search for the killer reveals Laura’s…
Rudolf Sebestyen is missing, and Marianne Smalls is involved in an illicit affair with the shady Jonas Schmitt. Both cases converge when Dora Urban, Rudolf’s beautiful and mysterious half-sister, and Lamont Smalls, Marianne’s suspicious husband,…
The Sawbrooks have lived on prime real estate on the lakes of Michigan since before there was prime real estate. A family of smugglers and bootleggers, every man, woman, and child in each generation has been taught to navigate the nooks and crannies…
Unfolding during the moody Pacific Northwest winter of 1951, we follow Bernadette Baston, scholar of child development and language acquisition, as she travels to a penitentiary on the remote island Elita in the Puget Sound to consult on a curious…
First in a series. Eli North is not okay. His drinking is getting worse by the day, his emotional wounds after a deployment to Afghanistan are as raw as ever, his marriage and career are over, and the only job he can hold down is with the local…
Peyton Collard was a good man once, but his life changed after a horrific car accident. Divorced, drunk, and severely damaged, Peyton is offered a life-changing sum of money to kill an evil man. But as he goes on a vigilante journey that leaves a…
Graphic novel. An FBI agent from the cult crime beat and a woman with a past linked to the Satanic Panic are drawn into a terrifying hunt for an insane killer hiding in the shadows of the underworld. Can you ever escape your past, or are all your…
A full 45 years after the events of Cottonwood, and two decades after the events of Hop Alley, Bill Ogden has relocated from the frontier west to the seedy noir world of 1916 Los Angeles. He has a photography studio in Los Angeles, and his…
The troubles of two desperate families—one white, one Mexican American—converge in the ruthless underworld of an Arkansas chicken processing plant in this new thriller from the award-winning author of 'Don't Know Tough.'
Gabriela Menchaca and Edwin…
After a decade of exile precipitated by the tragic death of his mother, Will Seems returns home from Richmond to rural Southern Virginia, taking a job as deputy sheriff in a landscape given way to crime and defeat. Impoverished and abandoned, this…
In the spring of America’s bicentennial, a man named Duane Oshun runs out of gas in Lincoln, Montana, a former mining boomtown. In this outlaw community, Duane joins a logging crew, falls for a waitress, and attempts to befriend his neighbor, a…
Seattle, 1933. The city is in the grips of the Great Depression, Prohibition, and vice. Cutting his teeth on a small-time beat, hungry and ambitious young reporter William “Shoe” Shumacher gets a tip that could change his career. There’s been a…
From “one of the most original minds in contemporary literature” (Nick Hornby) the bestselling and award-winning author of Golden Hill delivers a noirish detective novel set in the 1920s that reimagines how American history would be different if,…
Set in a world of the near future, the celebrity elite have access to a technology that allows them to make perfect copies of themselves, known as Portraits. These Portraits exist to fulfil all the various duties that come as the price of fame.
Our…
