Film noir and neo noir have the obvious differences. With Neo meaning "new" in French, I guess neo noir could be film noir's baby? It's a little more up to date and interests a newer generation. It's in color, updated style, themes are more exciting..etc. First in Midnight in Silicon Alley, we are brought to places like Arcadia and San Gabriel which has a large population of the Asian community. So you can sort of picture the Chinese mob capturing Chen. Especially in those areas, it sort of can be seen as noir like, with the descriptions of the brothels and such. It's quite unappealing. They are first in socal, but then it redirects us to Silicon Valley, where i think is part of Norcal? but it makes the narrative interesting because we have these images in our heads of the specific places. It's an advantage for us because we live in the Los Angeles area, but what about other readers who are not familiar with the area. it probably wouldn't be as visual. Even the name with Valley changed to "Silicon Alley". Alleys are usually dark small spaces, where a lot of crimes happen. I think i just talked about two different topics...