Green Arcade

"The Miata jumped the curb and sheared off a light pole. The impact deployed the airbags, but Chainbang was ready. He knifed Klinger's before it was fully inflated and his own before it could crush the glass pipe in his breast pocket. The six-inch blade went through the nylon like a pit bull through a kindergarten." Snitch World takes place in a San Francisco of menacing technology, where the old cons come up short and the crimes of the gritty night have morphed into slick capers pulled off by the glow of a smartphone. Klinger hangs out at the Hawse Hole, a sordid dive even by Tenderloin standards. All he really wants is enough cash to buy a cup of coffee, some cigarettes, a bug-free hotel room. The simple act of picking a carefully targeted mark's pocket initiates a series of events that get stranger and more dangerous by the moment. Jim Nisbet, with his characteristic humor and brilliant prose, creates a world where trust, and even cash, are the avatars of a loser's game. This is Snitch World, where a nine-dollar app can be as deadly as a dirty needle. Also included is a recent interview with Jim Nisbet, in conversation with Patrick Marks, owner and publisher of San Francisco's The Green Arcade, talking about writing, books, and technology.

Edge City, from the author of Low Bite, takes place in an every-noir-city (a thinly veiled portrait of San Francisco's North Beach), and its newest resident is Reno, an angry fledgling just hatched out of prison. Getting out is like a weird dream, and the streets of the City are a muddle of sensations pooling around her. First, there's the bustle-everybody busy with mysterious businesses-an amplifying racket of choices. Staggering out onto the late night streets of the City, Reno ends up at the infamous Istanbul Club: dim lights, Arabic music and the sensual Su'ad dancing. Music, booze, babes and drugs: what more could a felonious girl want? She encounters Huntington, the poisonous charmer who lives above the Club-perverse and powerful in the way only the wealthy can be. Eddie, the underage bartender, is happy to chemically enhance, every waking moment. Slowmotion, the sound light technician, huge and darkly mysterious, has connections to people and places that Reno didn't even know existed. Slowmotion's elegant friend, Poppy, offers mental transport to realms beyond Xanadu; in her little valise there's everything necessary for any trip, including the hallucinogenic "Teeth of Idi Amin." The owner of the club, handsome gambler Sinclair, hires Reno to waitress. Grumbling, drinking, snarling, and swearing, Reno bangs her way through everyone else's complicated plans, entangling herself in a byzantine labyrinth of betrayal, revenge, and general mayhem, and yes, good times.

A Moment of Doubt is at turns hilarious, thrilling, and obscene. Jim Nisbet's novella is ripped from the zeitgeist of the '80s, and set in a sex-drenched San Francisco, where the computer becomes the protagonist's co-conspirator and both writer and machine seem to threaten the written word itself. The City as whore provides a backdrop oozing with drugs, poets and danger. Nisbet has written a madcap meditation on the angst of a writer caught in a world where the rent is due, new technology offers up illicit ways to produce the latest bestseller, and the detective and other characters of the imagination might just sidle up to the bar and buy you a drink in real life. The world of A Moment of Doubt is the world of phone sex, bars and bordellos, AIDS, and the lure of hacking. Coming up against the rules of the game, the detective genre itself-has never been such a nasty and gender-defying challenge. Plus, An interview with Jim Nisbet, who is "Still too little read in the United States, it's a joy for us that Nisbet has been recognized here..." Regards: Le Mouvement des Idées

Low Bite: Sin Soracco's prison novel about survival, dignity, friendship, and insubordination. The view from inside a women's prison isn't a pretty one, and Morgan, the narrator, knows that as well as anyone. White, female, 26, convicted of nighttime breaking and entering with force, she works in the prison law library, giving legal counsel of more-or-mostly-less usefulness to other convicts. More useful is the hooch stash she keeps behind the law books. And, she has plenty of enemies-like Johnson, the lesbian-hating warden, and Alex, the "pretty little dude" lawyer who doesn't like her free legal advice. Then there's Rosalie and Birdeye, serious rustlers whose loyalty lasts about as long as their cigarettes hold out. And then, there's China: Latina, female, 22, holding U.S. citizenship through marriage, convicted of conspiracy to commit murder-a dangerous woman who is safer in prison than she is on the streets. They're all trying to get through without getting caught or going straight, but there's just one catch-a bloodstained bank account that everybody wants, including some players on the outside.