Homicide cops talk about the “unholy trinity” behind most murders: greed, lust, revenge. In White’s collection of 22 noir tales you have all three motives on display, sometimes all three working in combination with one another. Take “Gone Fishing,” for example. A man cheats on his best friend with the man’s wife. That man wants to take him fishing in rough weather in a small boat on open water. There’s more than catching yellow perch behind the invitation. Scott Suddeth stops at a roadside greasy spoon in “Marigold’s Diner” while running from an aborted casino heist and his life is changed forever when he pities the woman serving him. Another thief boosts from the railroad in “Barn Find” until the day he discovers a muscle car rotting away in a barn and decides to steal it from a rich man. Desperate is a word that doesn’t do justice to some others, like the debt collector in “Fish Out of Water,” The aging ex-con “Kiss of Death” who sees his life like the film on TV or the deceived husband who takes a walk on the wild side at a highway restaurant in Oklahoma when he overhears three long-haul truckers talking about “a package for delivery” and discovers a kidnapped girl instead. And there’s the gemstone miner who returns home for his father’s funeral in “The Homecoming” still looking for treasure.  A factory worker who punches a bully at work learns he has little time to save himself from the revenge of two dangerous thugs in “Kettle Blowing”; his trap will be either ingenious or one big fail while waiting for his tormentors to show up at his place. A man traveling to a strange town for work is befriended by a man in a bar who offers him his place to stay while he’s gone in “Perfect Stranger.” The only problem is that there’s another occupant in the host’s place and that person is lying very still.

Sleazy motels, seedy diners,  factories, jails, and bars aren’t the only places where danger lurks in these stories. On a California highway shut down for repair in “Revenge of the Judas Goat,” there’s a disgruntled former employee who wants revenge. A woman picked up in a club mixes a drink for her new loverboy and waits to surprise him with the truth of who she is in the flash fiction “Missed Call.” A traveling religious sideshow in the Appalachians splits an impressionable son from his drunken father.

The luckless men and women who try to escape their fates in Fade to Black mostly discover that they’ve been running toward it all the time. White’s subtitle is fitting: “Noir Stories of Drifters, Grifters, & Unlovable Losers.” It isn’t all hopeless, as some stories will show, like the young lawyer who loses his job in a law firm because of a stupid prank and winds up in a homeless camp befriended by a street savvy transient in “The One Who Saves You.”   And there’s the son of a successful businessman in “The Soul Food King of Indianapolis” who discovers the law doesn’t cover everyone’s needs. Or, more ominously, in “Boosting for the Devil” in which a young car thief levels up work for a suave boss in Miami and discovers the penalty for breaking one of his rules. The fate meant for him went to another but his memory is forever scalded by his experience.

Frank, the sociopathic con, in “I Remember” tells his own tale of a robbery gone wrong and subsequent incarceration to an ambitious listener, only to turn that man’s greed into his salvation.  As the bible says, the rain falls on the just and unjust alike.