In the murderous summer heat—when, to quote Raymond Chandler, “Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks”—we invite you to chill with the icy killers, con men, and cops of our second noir issue. Giampiero Rigosi’s hustlers board the “Night Bus” in Bologna, and Leonardo Padura’s burned-out Cuban policeman confronts Hurricane Felix and his own tropical depression in “Havana Black.” Tonino Benacquista’s Parisian gallery worker wrestles modern art and a modern art thief in “Framed,” Gianrico Carofiglio’s weary Italian lawyer tries to stop smoking and go straight in “A Walk in the Dark,” and Marek Krajewski’s laconic inspector finds corpses in walls and ghosts everywhere in “End of the World in Breslau.” Jakob Arjouni’s disgraced gangster plots his heroic redemption in the antic “Black Story,” while Santiago Paez’s Ecuadorian cops investigate a suicide who’s literally gone to pieces. Let tempers and temperatures rise: As Chandler noted, “Anything can happen.”