Blasting his way from the pages of Black Mask magazine comes Race Williams, the star of Them That Lives by Their Guns, Volume 1, a collection devoted to the stories of Carroll John Daly’s hardboiled detective. Brooks E. Hefner’s fine introduction refers to the voice that Daly used in these stories as the “easily recognizable, slang-laden bravado of Race Williams,” a guy who “never bumped off a guy what didn’t need it” (or so Race tells us in his first adventure, “The Knights of the Open Palm”). Daly’s style takes a little bit of getting used to, but the stories move fast, and Race has a way with words—and with his pistols. Included along with the 16 Race Williams stories are three other early hardboiled tales by Daly, along with a couple of short nonfiction pieces. This is a huge volume, 654 pages, and an important one for anyone interested in the history of the hardboiled PI or hardboiled fiction in general. I eagerly await the publication of Volume 2.
Mary Burton’s third novel to feature the Morgans, a Tennessee family whose members are predominantly employed in law enforcement, I’ll Never Let You Go tells the story of Tennessee Bureau of Investigation (TBI) agent Alex Morgan’s involvement with veterinarian Leah Carson, who, four years prior to the events depicted within, was brutally assaulted and left for dead by her estranged husband, Philip. Although he supposedly died some months later, it seems he may have faked his death, as Leah receives unmistakable signs that she is once again being stalked. As the anniversary of her near-lethal knifing approaches, Leah is convinced that Philip is out to finish the job he began years before.
Burton is a master of suspense, letting us know exactly what is at stake via her brutal first chapter depicting Philip’s first attack, then slowly ratcheting up the tension throughout the remainder of the story as Leah is subjected to an unrelenting campaign of terror. Leah is a strong, credible heroine, whom readers can admire and root for; her extremely inventive, extremely loathsome stalker is, sad to say, positively brilliant at finding ways to torment her. All in all, a fast, slick, entertaining piece of work, sure to please fans of the first two books, and hold her audience for the final installment, Vulnerable, due out in April.
If you find yourself craving suspense, Patricia Abbott’s Concrete Angel should more than satisfy those desires. Abbott wastes no time in plunging her readers into the sordid story she has to tell, as the two main characters, middle-aged Eve Moran and her young daughter Christine, find themselves dealing with the problem of a corpse in their apartment. The story of how they get out of that situation, and, more importantly, how they found themselves in it, makes for riveting reading.
Reading this well-crafted debut, many will likely find themselves thinking about the best of a variety of fine purveyors of noir, including the likes of James M. Cain, Jim Thompson, Robert Bloch, and Patricia Highsmith. Narrated by Christine, the book has a tell-all/true-confessions vibe to it, tempered with a morality lesson that could easily have come from the pages of Charles Biro’s infamous Crime Does Not Pay comic books. Readers will feel dread as to what Eva might do next, but won’t be able to disengage from voyeuristically experiencing her car wreck of a life.
The Pacific Northwest constitutes an invigorating setting for mystery novels, and, as a reader, I look forward to experiencing its pristine beauty in a vicarious fashion whenever possible. Consequently, I am always thrilled when a new title arrives from Ellie Alexander (aka Kate Dyer-Seeley), author of the fantastic Bakeshop Mystery series. On Thin Icing, the third Bakeshop Mystery, is an enticing read, especially if you are snowbound on a chilly winter weekend. It takes series protagonist Juliet “Jules” Capshaw away from her hometown of Ashland, Oregon, and into the mountains to cater the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s board of directors’ retreat. It’s an opportunity for Jules to expand the customer base for Torte, the bakery owned by her mother. Since graduating from culinary school, Jules has specialized as a pastry and dessert chef, but she is eager to market the business more extensively. Unfortunately, her new gig is a real killer, and there’s no escape from danger since she and the retreat group are snowed in during a massive blizzard. To compound the tension, Jules’ estranged husband Carlos is also unexpectedly at the resort, but Jules is ambivalent about forgiving him for the indiscretion that destroyed their relationship. Alexander skillfully creates a tense atmosphere of suspicion, fear, and cabin fever for a thrilling conclusion that leaves open a potential beginning for the next Bakeshop Mystery. On Thin Icing is on firm footing!
May I propose a toast to the success of To Brew or Not to Brew, Joyce Tremel’s inaugural Brewing Trouble Mystery. Employing a new microbrewing hook, she sets the series in Pittsburgh, her hometown (and mine). More specifically, the setting is the newly gentrified Butler Street in the neighborhood of Lawrenceville, an area that any “yinzers” (Pittsburghese for a native Pittsburgher) will easily recognize. Paying tribute to the Steel City’s longtime love affairs with beer and sports teams, Tremel introduces Maxine “Max” O’Hara, brewmaster extraordinaire and proud owner of The Allegheny Brew House, on the verge of opening. Trouble is brewing, though, when someone resorts to sabotage in order to drive Max away and prevent the pub from opening. Destroying Max’s brewing equipment is bad enough, but the murder of Kurt, Max’s German mentor and restaurant chef, is catastrophic. Unfortunately, the police—including Max’s dad, who is a police detective—initially ascribe Kurt’s death to accidental causes. Max knows otherwise, unequivocally. Careful Kurt would have never put himself in an unsafe position around brewing equipment. Despite the installation of a new state-of-theart security system, the sabotage continues. Who has it in for Max and the Allegheny? And how is the criminal skirting the security system and gaining entrance to the locked pub? When Max’s prime suspect is murdered in the locked, empty brewery, she and her friends become ever more determined to bring the culprit to ground and ensure the brewery’s successful open. While I figured out whodunit and how, this did not diminish my reading pleasure in the least, which is a compliment to the author’s skill. I am looking forward to the next round in the series. Ms. Tremel, please make it a seasonal!
Karin Slaughter’s current standalone thriller focuses on two sisters. Aside from trophy wife Claire and single mother Lydia having chosen different roads in life, you probably wouldn’t confuse them with the two party-animal siblings in the new Tina Fey-Amy Poehler comedy Sisters. Nor would you mistake them for the disturbing, horrific sibs portrayed by Margot Kidder in the 1973 Brian De Palma movie of the same name (though that twisted cult fave is a closer match in attitude and atmosphere). Make no mistake, Pretty Girls—in which Claire discovers that her seemingly ideal, thoughtful, and considerate millionaire husband Paul is a homicidal monster—does not shy away from the twisted. Nor is there anything in De Palma’s blood-soaked homage to Hitchcock that isn’t topped by Slaughter’s descriptions of rape and torture and worse. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, if it’s to your taste. Otherwise, Pretty Girls is a carefully crafted, undeniably suspenseful tale that puts Claire and Lydia through enough perils and brutalities to fill a survival handbook for women. And there’s a third sister, Julia, whose disappearance as a teenager 20 years ago sent the family into a decline from which it never quite recovered. Listening to the way the author places the loathsome Paul at the center of all of the family’s woes is equal to sitting in on a master class in plotting. Actress Kathleen Early (CSI:Cyber, Grey’s Anatomy) reads Slaughter’s prose with an effective sense of urgency and does not stint in dramatizing the book’s most highly charged passages, including Paul’s ultra-sadistic tormenting of Lydia. The audio package includes an extra: Blonde Hair, Blue Eyes, a considerably more sedate novella by Slaughter, also narrated by Early. Set in 1991, it concentrates on Julia, an attractive 19-year-old journalism student at the University of Georgia who becomes alarmed at the number of rapes in her community. Author and reader combine to present a multidimensional portrait of Julia who, in pitching a story to the student paper’s faculty advisor about local crimes against women, offers a list of eye-opening statistics on the prevalence of sex crimes. The story’s ending underlines those statistics in an effectively chilling manner.
Billed as “the most complete collection of Sherlock Holmes stories ever assembled,” this includes none of Arthur Conan Doyle’s official fictions about the famous sleuth, though there are a couple of his self-parodies. Instead, the approximately 80 entries edited by Otto Penzler consist of pastiches, parodies, satires, and slapsticks penned by an assortment of famous authors, from Doyle’s contemporaries such as James M. Barrie and O. Henry to today’s Thomas Perry, John Lescroart, Bill Crider, and well-known Sherlockians Laurie R. King and Leslie S. Klinger. One of the more intriguing parodies, “The South Sea Soup Company,” is by Kenneth Millar (Ross Macdonald), his first fiction, written for his Kitchener, Ontario high school journal. Each story in the collection is accompanied by an author biography, heavy on the bibliography. The assortment of narrators and their varied British accents help to keep the pieces from seeming too similar. The audio edition is labeled unabridged, but there are entries listed in the print edition by Stephen King, Anthony Burgess, and Anthony Boucher that are missing from my copy—not that nearly 47 hours of Sherlock Holmes spoofs aren’t enough.
The author, who died in 2014 at age 100, was the widow of Frederic Dannay, the editorial and puzzle-creating partner of the Ellery Queen team. They met on New Year’s Eve, 1974, when he was a lonely, unhappy man, a hypochondriac and borderline agoraphobic who had lost two wives and a third lady friend to cancer. Most who knew Fred at that time would have agreed with Francis M. Nevins’ opinion put forth in his excellent introduction that Rose saved his life. By the time of his death in 1982, the man who avoided travel and public speaking had visited Japan, Israel, Sweden, and Great Britain, had been interviewed on The Dick Cavett Show, and had made a number of public appearances, always with anxiety but always with success.
Rose Dannay’s account of their life together does not gloss over their conflicts or deny that Fred could be a very difficult man to live with. But no one will doubt the appropriateness of the book’s subtitle. New biographical details include Fred’s anecdotes of his and partner Manfred Lee’s humorous and exasperating Hollywood experiences, and an account of his near-fatal 1940 car accident that led to months of hospitalization and an erroneous radio report of his death by Walter Winchell.
An old hand at short popular biographies (among earlier subjects are Chaucer, J. M. W. Turner, Newton, and Poe) turns to the unconventional, gout-plagued social crusader and plot architect who wrote The Woman in White and The Moonstone, Wilkie Collins, a close friend of Charles Dickens whose theatrical enthusiasms he shared. The narrative is equally devoted to the life and the works.
Discussing the early short story “The Diary of Anne Rodway,” Ackroyd calls the title character “the first female detective in English literature.”
The reader is urged to go beyond Collins’ two tentpoles and explore his other novels, nearly all of which are solidly in the mystery and detection category and worth exploring. Per Ackroyd’s descriptions, Collins never lost his touch, even in his much-maligned later novels.
Don’t let its diminutive size fool you—Minette Walters’ The Cellar may be fewer than 200 pages long, but it packs one heckuva literary punch. At first blush, the Edgar-winner’s latest may appear to be nothing more than a horror-tinged revenge tale; look closer, though, and you’ll find incisive observations about race, gender, class, and culture, and a powerful argument for the Golden Rule.
Before the youngest son of London-dwelling African immigrants Ebuka and Yetunde Songoli went missing, 14-year-old orphan Muna was the family’s slave. She cooked and cleaned for them, was forced to sleep in a locked cellar, and suffered all manner of abuse. Then Scotland Yard was called to investigate the boy’s disappearance and Muna’s life improved dramatically. The rapes and beatings stopped, she was given nice clothes and a real bed, and Ebuka and Yetunde claimed her as their daughter. The Songolis explained away Muna’s inability to read, write, and speak English by claiming she suffered brain damage at birth, but in reality, Muna is far more capable and intelligent than anyone suspects—and now that she has some leverage over the Songolis, she has no intention of being their victim ever again.
The first several chapters of The Cellar paint such a horrific picture of Muna’s life with the Songolis that you assume you’re in for an unrelentingly bleak tale of heartbreak, cruelty, and despair. Consequently, when Muna decides to take advantage of the police’s scrutiny to turn the tables on her captors, the shift in tone is such a relief that you can’t help but root for her success. Manipulation quickly turns to torment, though, and by the time you realize Muna has evolved from helpless prey to sadistic predator, you’re already complicit in her machinations. Walters’ prose is lean, her plot is tight, and while her story’s ending is a bit too abrupt to fully satisfy, The Cellar is a thought-provoking read that chills and thrills in equal measure.
Danish Red Cross nurse Nina Borg’s greatest professional strength can also be her most glaring personal flaw: an unwavering ability to put the needs of the downtrodden and the suffering above her own. Nina is nothing if not a dedicated nurse, but it comes at a price. In the fourth and last installment in their powerful series (after 2013’s Death of a Nightingale), Lene Kaaberbøl and Agnete Friis continue to thrust their protagonist into dangerous situations, but it’s not the blows Nina suffers that resonate the most (and she gets tossed around a lot this time around); it is her struggle to reconcile her desire to do the kind of work that fulfills her while also being present as a mother to her children, Ida and Anton.
While in Viborg, Denmark, to assist her mother through chemotherapy for breast cancer, Nina is apart from her children back in Copenhagen, and finally divorced from her husband Morten. Danger finds her in the form of a seemingly random assault in a parking lot, when a man hits her with an iron bar but is strangely apologetic, muttering the Lord’s Prayer in a language Nina can’t quite place. The attack fractures her skull (just another in her list of injuries accrued over the course of the series), and sends her on-again, off-again romantic interest, cop Søren Kirkegard, rushing to her side (much to her consternation).
Nina and Søren eventually figure out that her attacker is connected to events from a time Nina spent in Manila, where she once interrupted a beach vacation with Morten to help local victims of a building explosion—rather than help her own marriage.
The action flashes back and forth between Denmark and the Philippines, as Kaaberbøl and Friis slowly unspool the lives of three medical students in Manila—Vincent, Vadim, and Victor—and the events that lead up to the Manila tragedy, its mass casualties, and the link between the “three Vs” and Nina.
As in previous installments, Kaaberbøl and Friis tackle social justice issues head-on, this time looking at the housing slums of Manila and the shifty tactics of the wealthy when it comes to cutting corners to save money, often at the expense of their neediest fellow citizens. The most powerful passages come when Nina confronts her own mortality, and realizes that the question of death, particularly her own, is now something that consumes her teenage daughter, Ida. For all the times that Nina has tried to protect those who have been abused, she ultimately cannot protect her own daughter from the fear of a parent’s death. Her daughter’s struggle brings up painful memories of Nina’s own: her father committed suicide when she was 12, an event that seeps into the novel and colors Nina’s life and relationship with her children. But for all the hardship and the pain she’s endured, Nina is able to walk off the final page as strong as she’s always enabled others to be.
Although I generally prefer traditional mysteries or police procedurals, I was pleasantly surprised to find myself thoroughly enjoying this suspense thriller about former MI5 agents who, for one reason or another, are demoted to Slough House. Referred to as slow horses, most have screwed up as MI5 agents, either because of addiction or a major foul-up, and are relegated to paper shuffling and other menial jobs. But when Catherine Standish, one of their female coworkers, is kidnapped and held for an odd ransom, the labyrinthian plot takes off like a NASA rocket.
Plots and subplots abound, reaching into the highest realms of modern British politics. It’s like Mad magazine’s old “Spy vs. Spy” episodes, only with a great deal more complexity. I found myself cheering for the underdog Slough House team, particularly River Cartwright, Shirley Dander, and Marcus Longridge, as they finally get their chance to do more than office dog-work in an attempt to rescue their coworker and discover what is behind her ransom note. It’s a quest that leads them to the very bowels of the MI5 headquarters in search of odd intel files.
What makes this work is top-notch writing and characterization. Thanks to crisp, clever dialogue, the reader is quickly drawn into the odd camaraderie of the Slough House team and their specific quirks. Likewise, the Machiavellian plotting and counter-plotting by top government and MI5 officials is deliciously played out. What this all leads to is a knock ’em, sock ’em denouement that brings together all of the opposing forces into one slam-bang finish.
Mick Herron is a highly regarded British author who has won an Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Readers Award and the British Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger for Best Crime Novel. He is the author of nine crime novels, two of which are in the Slough House series and a third is in the works.
Suburbia is merely hell dressed up in designer duds in Jason Starr’s satiric Savage Lane, where few are perfect, and plenty are rotten. Divorced teacher Karen Daily is a nice enough woman, but when her overly affectionate body language leads to an unwanted love triangle, Karen begins to wish she’d kept her hands to herself. Mark Berman, her neighbor and wannabe lover, has become obsessed with her, even going so far as to plan a divorce from Deb, his wife, in order to move in with Karen. Karen can be pretty clueless, and is shocked when she is physically attacked by Mark’s wife at the country club. In one of the funniest fight scenes ever, Karen and Deb roll on the floor, poke eyes, and tear hair while the ladies who lunch look on, aghast. But Deb has no right to throw the first stone at the suspected adulteress, since she herself has long been involved in a steamy affair with an underaged teen. When someone winds up murdered in this funny, naughty book, it comes as no surprise. There is never any doubt whodunit, since Savage Lane is more of a psychological thriller than a mystery—and a riotous one at that. Mixing comedy with suspense has always been risky, because humor can deflate the sense of danger, but author Starr knows what he’s doing. He can wring laughs out of a noose, and snickers out of a whack on the head. Savage Lane may not be a pretty place, but for readers looking for a good time, it is pure gold.
Portraits of freshly dead people turn up in strange places in Larissa Reinhart’s mysteries, and her The Body in the Landscape is no exception. Hapless artist Cherry Tucker travels to a private Georgia game preserve to paint the portrait of a dead pig and the hunter who killed it. The pig was no barnyard innocent. Escaped from captivity, Super Swine ravaged the countryside, tearing up fences, and destroying crops. Because of its wicked tusks and nasty nature, it also scared the bejesus out of local farmers, children, and dogs. Although this humorous mystery may not be embraced by vegetarians, those of us raised in the South and who are used to shot-dead varmints (of both the two- and four-legged variety) will laugh out loud at Super Swine’s adventures. Also worth mentioning are the humorous antics of a group of high-rolling hunters who paid thousands of dollars for the right to kill the porcine plunderer. Because of Cherry’s experiences in previous books (Portrait of a Dead Guy, Death in Perspective) she knows that—Super Swine notwithstanding—man has always been the most dangerous game, making her the perfect protagonist for this giggle-inducing, down-home fun.
There’s no reason not to read Christmas stories year-round, especially the ones in Wait for Signs: Twelve Longmire Stories, composed of stories that Craig Johnson included each year with his annual Christmas newsletter. Not all the stories are about Christmas, though most of them are. Also included are stories set on holidays like Thanksgiving and New Year’s. In his acknowledgments, Johnson says that “some are mysteries, some have mysterious elements, and others are no mystery at all, just glimpses into Walt’s life.” The familiar characters and themes are all here, and this is a fine collection for Longmire fans or anyone who simply likes a good story.
There is a whole different kind of Christmas story in Thuglit Presents: Cruel Yule, edited by Todd Robinson (aka Big Daddy Thug). Keep in mind the first word in the title. Thuglit and Big Daddy Thug don’t present any stories, not even of Christmas, for the faint of heart. There’s blood, death, and lots of cussing. But lots of humor, too, as in Rob Hart’s “The Santa Con,” in which you get not one, but six bad Santas robbing a bank. Things do not go well. Outright hilarity, not to mention blood and cussing, reigns in Brace Godfrey’s “Feliz Navidead,” a story “discovered by Johnny Shaw.” It’s a tale of Chingón, the world’s deadliest Mexican. I’m still laughing about this one. Is there a creep in every office? There’s one, a really creepy creep, in Hilary Davidson’s “Mistletoe.” Sometimes a creep gets what’s coming to him, though. The other stories in the anthology are as dark and funny as the ones I’ve mentioned. If this is to your taste, you won’t want to miss this book.
Joe Lansdale’s Hap and Leonard is a collection of tales about two of the most entertaining characters in crime fiction. In the opening novella, Hyenas, there’s a young man in trouble. He’s mixed up with some really bad folks, and his brother asks Hap and Leonard for help in extracting his brother from the mess. Hilarity and violence ensue—as they do in the other stories here. One story, “Veil’s Visit,” is a collaboration between Lansdale and Andrew Vachss. The character of Veil might remind you of one of the authors. Besides the stories, there’s an introduction by Michael Koryta, an interview with Hap and Leonard conducted by Lansdale, and a short essay on how the series came to be. Rumor has it that the e-book version of this collection will have a somewhat different table of contents, as well as a short memoir about a certain Bill Crider and his long friendship with Joe Lansdale.
One of the reasons I enjoy mystery fiction so much is the diversity of characters, places, and plots that the genre offers.
Readers can immerse themselves in the lightest of mysteries, the most hard-boiled of stories, or an action-packed thriller and find satisfaction in each.
While the plot is always important, for most of us the characters are paramount to the story.
That’s why when I thought about the two most important novels that I read this month—mysteries whose stories have stuck with me long after I turned the pages—it was no surprise that each is so different.
The two novels are Orphan X by Gregg Hurwitz and What Remains of Me by Alison Gaylin.
Hurwitz’s novel is pure thriller, with nonstop action from the first page to the last. Gaylin’s novel is more of a psychological study, a solid story that is neither a cozy nor a hard-boiled novel.
And while the lead characters in both novels are vastly different, they are both well-shaped characters whose heart and soul comes through clearly in the stories. The plots are pretty good, too.
Orphan X launches a new series by Hurwitz, who is best known for his stand-alone thrillers. Orphan X is Evan Smoak, who since childhood was trained to be an assassin under the government’s secret Orphan Program.
It wasn’t difficult teaching him to kill, Evan’s handler told him, “The hard part is keeping you human.” But Evan left that program and is now on his own mission—to help those in need.
Hurwitz keeps Orphan X's action believable while offering a character study of the electrifying Evan, who must choose daily to do good.
Gaylin, best known for her Brenna Spector series, offers a perceptive, intriguing stand-alone in What Remains of Me.
Gaylin’s lead character is Kelly Lund, who at 17 years old is sentenced to 25 years in prison after being convicted of killing Oscar-nominated director John McFadden during a party in his home. Then, five years after her release, Kelly is suspected of murdering her father-in-law in a similar way.
What Remains of Me is about a small group of Hollywood teens and the adults they have become in their late 40s.
But What Remains of Me also is a tale of Hollywood, of fleeting fame, of unreliable narrators, including the media, and image.
We live in an era in which privacy is a commodity to be played with. A person can be a hero in the press one day, the villain the next. A photograph of a person taken at an odd moment suddenly becomes a testament to who they really are.
It would be hard at this point for me to choose which one of these novels I liked better.
But fortunately, as readers, we don’t have to choose. We can read both.
Orphan X and What Remains of Me just came out this month (February 2016).
Both Hurwitz and Gaylin also are on tour, and will be featured in the next issue of Mystery Scene magazine, which will be out soon.
Features
Gregg Hurwitz: The Birth of Orphan X
With Evan Smoak, an author best known for standalone thrillers has finally found a character he can return to, again and again.
by Oline H. Cogdill
Margaret Millar
Influential and widely read, this author broke ground for such later writers as Ruth Rendell and P.D. James.
by Tom Nolan
Jessica Jones
A complex, conflicted TV hero for our troubled times.
by Kevin Burton Smith
The Verdict
Current legal thrillers that explore the limits of law and order.
by Jon L. Breen
Alison Gaylin
The author’s uses her own tabloid experience as a jumping off point for her new thriller.
by Oline H. Cogdill
Ausma Zehanat Khan
Her thoughtful novels follow the struggles of a devout Muslim police detective in a secular world.
by Oline H. Cogdill
The Hook
First Lines That Caught Our Attention
Gormania
A chat with Trish MacGregor, author of supernatural suspense novels.
by Ed Gorman
Our Critics Choose Their Criminous Favorites of 2015
Fave Raves of the Year
by Mystery Scene contributors
“Stranglers on a Train” Crossword
by Verna Suit
Departments
At the Scene
by Kate Stine
Mystery Miscellany
by Louis Phillips
Hints & Allegations
Anthony and Shamus awards, Hammett Prize, CWA Daggers
Reviews
Small Press Reviews: Covering the Independents
by Betty Webb
Short & Sweet: Short Stories Considered
by Bill Crider
Very Original: Paperback Originals Reviewed
by Lynne Maxwell & Hank Wagner
Sounds of Suspense: Audiobooks Reviewed
by Dick Lochte
What About Murder? Reference Books Reviewed
by Jon L. Breen
Mystery Scene Reviews
Miscellaneous
The Docket
Letters
Our Readers Recommend
Advertiser Info
Hi Everyone,
Finding someone you want to spend a lot of time with is always a treat. Ask Gregg Hurwitz, who, after a series of bestselling standalone thrillers, has finally found a character he can hang with for the long haul—Evan Smoak, former assassin in the black ops “Orphan” program and current vigilante do-gooder. Evan Smoak is already being called the next Jack Reacher or Jason Bourne and Oline Cogdill chats with Hurwitz in his first interview about Orphan X to discuss his hard-charging new hero.
Ausma Zehanat Khan’s second novel, The Language of Secrets, returns to the world of Detective Esa Khattak, a devout Muslim assigned to Canada’s Community Policing Section that investigates minority-sensitive cases. Khan, a British-born Canadian human rights activist, scholar, and lawyer, notes, “I have been reading mysteries all my life, but have not often seen characters of color or writers of color. To have the chance to add my voice and perspective has been very heartening.” Khan is interviewed in this issue. The intersection of pop culture, the entertainment industry, and the media fascinates
Alison Gaylin. Gaylin, a graduate of Columbia’s School of Journalism, worked as a celebrity reporter for the Star tabloid in her early career and that experience informs her new thriller What Remains of Me. Oline Cogdill chats with the author in this issue.
Also, Jon Breen is back in court again to render his verdicts on current legal thrillers, and Ed Gorman chats with T.J. MacGregor, author of mysteries with a supernatural twist.
Tom Nolan discusses the work of Margaret Millar, a very popular mid-century writer whose star has dimmed over the years. This may be changing, and Nolan looks at all the reasons why in his essay.
Superheroes are all the rage, but Jessica Jones has more on her mind than your typical muscle-bound behemoth. She’s working through a failed stint as a crusading crimefighter and an even more traumatic turn as the puppet of another “super” with mind control abilities. And as Jessica is the first to admit, she’s not dealing with all this in a healthy way. Kevin Burton Smith takes a look at this thoughtful, absorbing, and unusual new series in this issue.
“Fave Raves” is back! Our wide-ranging, expert selection of the best of 2015 allows our critics to bring to your attention worthy books that you may have missed last year. We’re always interested in hearing your recommendations as well. Please send in your fave raves for our next issue. Email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and you’ll be entered to win a free book.
Kate Stine
Editor-in-chief
“The Short Mystery Fiction Society was founded in 1986 1996 to promote the reading, writing and publication of short-form mystery and crime.” So we’re told on the back cover of Flash and Bang, edited by J. Alan Hartman. This anthology is the first publication by the SMFS, and there are some fine yarns inside, from Bobbi A. Chukran’s “The Conflagration at the Nameless Cotton Gin,” in which anonymous letters lead to arson, to Sandra Murphy’s “Arthur,” which has an unusual narrator, to John M. Floyd’s “Rosie’s Choice,” in which things aren’t as they might seem, to Laurie Stevens’ haunting “The Bag Lady.” There are 14 other equally pleasing stories, and even a poem. (Disclaimer: I’m a member of SMFS, but I had nothing to do with the publication of this anthology.)
It seemed for a short while that Best New England Crime Stories 2016: Red Dawn, edited by Mark Ammons, Katherine Fast, Barbara Ross, and Leslie Wheeler, might be the last in this fine series, but I heard recently that the series will likely be continuing. That’s good news. The 33 stories here range from the really short (editor Ammons’ “Relax, It’s Not Loaded” is three words shorter than its title) to somewhat longer. Kate Flora’s “Nice Guy” proves again that nice guys don’t always win. Ruth M. McCarty’s “The Wrinkle Curse” will make you think twice about what reversing aging might cost. Chris Knopf’s “Kill Switch” pits an inventor against a beautiful woman who just might not be what she seems. There’s plenty of other good stuff, too.
Coast to Coast: Murder From Sea to Shining Sea, edited by Andrew McAleer and Paul D. Marks, ranges all over the country, as you might expect from the title, and even into Mexico for the book’s first story, “Murder Medium Rare,” by William Link. In that one, a somewhat inept hit man is supposed to kill a star matador for his boss’ daughter. Things work out just fine, although not according to plan. In Robert S. Levinson’s “The Dead Detective,” the detective really is dead, but he returns from the Glorious After to solve his own murder. “La Bellezza Delle Bellezze” is one of Bill Pronzini’s Nameless Detective stories, and a good one, too, with an excellent sense of time, place, and character. There are nine more good stories here.
Clay Stafford is the editor of Cold-Blooded, an outgrowth of the annual Killer Nashville conference for crime writers and their fans. It contains 20 stories from both newcomers and bestselling writers such as Jeffery Deaver, Anne Perry, and Donald Bain. Bain pulls off a neat tale about multiple personality syndrome in “The Hunt for Skippy Walker,” Catriona McPherson explains that “Kissin’ Don’t Kill,” but you can never be too careful, while single-named Daco presents a zippy spy-romance story “The Virgo Affair.” I’m a fan of the novels of Heywood Gould, who proves himself adept at the short story as well in “He’ll Kill Again.” Editor Stafford provides a good introduction, as well as the concluding story in the book, “Savage Gulf,” which is a nice twist on the old theme of the life-changing high-school reunion.
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