"The Former Detective," by Jamil Jan Kochai, in Sacramento Noir, edited by John Freeman, Akashic Press, 2025.
The publisher sent me a free copy of this book.
It is an occasional complaint of mine that the editors and authors of this series forget that noir requires a crime, not just depressing events. Some stories in the current volume suffer from condition, but this is not one of them.
Zakariya was a cop in Afghanistan but now he and his wife are refugees living in an immigrant community in Southport. As the story begins he smells blood and traces it to a field where two strangers are burying the corpse of an Afghan teenager. Given his situation, this is not a crime Zakariya dares to get involved in, certainly not by investigating.
But it turns out that he is only one degree of separation from the family of the victim. And so we follow his conversations with the people who don't know what he knows about the situation.
A gloomy story with an interesting ending.