Seattle Weekly staff writer Rick Anderson’s Seattle Vice: Strippers, Prostitution, Dirty Money, and Crooked Cops in the Emerald City (Sasquatch, $17.95) reads like a work of fiction, primarily because of his considerable narrative gifts. (Among a cavalcade of honors received in his long career, Anderson’s 2009 SW article about the serial offender Stacy Stith is featured in the new Best American Crime Reporting anthology.) Seattle Vice also reads like history (equal parts cultural, criminal, political, and journalistic), because the “vaginal valley” depicted in his book bears no resemblance to the clean-scrubbed Seattle of today, where a squabble over who’s to sign an environmental impact statement passes for scandal. The book, recently excerpted in SW, goes well beyond the exploits of recently deceased porn magnate Frank Colacurcio—it’s an exhaustively researched alternative history of our region’s netherworld, penned by about the only journalist in town who’s qualified to write it. While nobody wants to return to the violence and bald-faced corruption of Seattle’s adolescent years, Anderson’s rich prose almost makes you feel nostalgic for that bygone era of sleaze. MIKE SEELY

Sat., Nov. 20, noon, 2010