Book Review: Beat to a Pulp: Hardboiled

The title of this anthology -Beat to a Pulp: Hardboiled- doesn’t reveal the range of its contents.Some of the stories are more subtle and nuanced than it suggests; Patricia Abbott’s story “Ric With No K” isn’t a genre piece at all, but a brilliant, heartbreaking tale of a lonely, brutalized child that stands alongside the work of Daniel Woodrell. Benoit Lelievre’s “Second Round Dive” is a sad and honest story of one of the many ways that boxers...