Akashic Noir books in order

Reading order

The Akashic Noir series is a massive anthology collection with 122 entries published between 2002 and 2025. Each volume is named after a city, region, or locale, and collects crime and noir short fiction set in that place. The series covers locations across every continent, from Brooklyn and Chicago to Lagos, Nairobi, and Baghdad. Several cities have received multiple volumes, including Brooklyn (three entries), Manhattan, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.

Because each book is an independent anthology, there is no strict reading order. Readers can pick up whichever city interests them most. That said, the series began with Brooklyn Noir in 2004 and has kept a steady pace of new releases ever since, with Sacramento Noir and Hamburg Noir being the most recent entries in 2025. The “Classics” sub-volumes revisit earlier cities with curated selections, adding another layer for readers who want to go deeper into a particular locale’s noir fiction.