After the critical and commercial success of Delhi Noir, part of New York's award-winning noir series, comes Mumbai Noir, which looks through a glass darkly at what is arguably India's most fascinating city. The stories in Mumbai Noir depict the many ways in which the city's ever-present shadowy aspects often force themselves onto the lives of ordinary people.

The city's chroniclers-to novelists, essayists, poets, journalists, and filmmakers-often seem overawed by the idea of Mumbai, rendering its quotidian realities in brushstrokes of grandiose narratives. What inoculates the stories in this collection from the hyperbole of "maximum city"-that much-abused term coined by the astute Sucheta Mehta to describe Mumbai-are the restraints set by the noir genre,

which stipulates, among other things, an unflinching gaze at the underbelly, without recourse to sentimentality or forced denouements. When viewed from a plane (or hot-air balloon), any metropolis might strike one as jaw-dropping. For a majority of Mumbai's residents, however, the city's overcrowded public transportation and decaying infrastructure fail to provide even the minimum of relief ...