From a pool of over 3,000 considered stories published last year--anything that touched on crime, mystery, and suspense, from venues as disparate as The Strand Magazine, Dark Yonder, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, The Bellevue Literary Review, and more--these are the very best, selected by series editor Otto Penzler and guest editor Anthony Horowitz.
The tales included cover a range of styles, highlighting the diversity of subjects and forms comprising the genre we call mystery fiction. Featuring a mixture of household names, masters of the short form, and newcomers to the field, the collection offers a variety that promises something for every reader. And it's all capped off by a vintage story from the first half of the previous century, sourced directly from the rare book room at the Mysterious Bookshop, the oldest mystery fiction specialty store in the world.
Authors include:
Colorful Christmas lights dapple the family homes in the idyllic lakeside town of Sweet Haven when Jennifer Dean, a young librarian at the local elementary school, is brutally murdered. There are witnesses and her boyfriend Travis Blake confesses to the crime... but something doesn't quite add up. Blake is a third generation Army Ranger, awarded the Silver Star for his heroism in Afghanistan--how could a beloved son of this tight-knit burgh commit such a grisly deed?
As a community of military families a few miles down the road from an Army base, no one in Sweet Haven wants to investigate a war hero like Blake, not even the top brass at the police department. In steps Cameron Winter, a rugged and lonesome English professor haunted by the ghosts of his own Christmas past, whose former lover asks him to prove Blake innocent. The Sweet Haven murder reverberates in his mind, echoing a horrific yuletide memory from his youth, and Winter knows there are darker powers at play here than a simple domestic dispute. If he can solve this small-town mystery, just maybe he can find peace from his inner demons as well.
The thirty-sixth novel by two-time Edgar Award winner Andrew Klavan, When Christmas Comes is a seasonal tale of tradition, family, and murder; its chilling twists are best experienced curled up beside a burning Yule log.
Cameron Winter is known for having a sense about crime. His background as a spy trained his mind--and his body--for action, and his current role as an English professor gives him a sharp understanding of human nature. But beyond that, he was born with a strange habit of mind--the ability to recreate detailed crime scenes in his imagination and dissect the motives and encounters that produced them. And after reading a puzzling news story about a wealthy family killed in a small town in the Chicago suburbs, he can't resist the chance to apply this deductive power in the pursuit of justice for the victims.
Three members of the family, along with their live-in nanny, were pulled from their burning mansion, already dead from gunshot wounds. The only survivor is a young boy whose memory of the event raises more questions than answers. The police seem happy to settle on a simple explanation and arrest the most obvious suspect--but Winter knows that obvious solutions are seldom the correct ones, and all too often hide a darker truth.
While Winter's investigation is welcomed by many who knew the victims, the lead detective makes it clear he not only wants Winters to stop looking for answers, but to stay out of his town altogether. Winter begins to understand why as he slowly uncovers crimes and unsavory behavior that had been ignored long before the killings, and in the process grows increasingly determined to find the real killer and expose the rot beneath the town's sanitized façade. And as the inquiry brings all-too-familiar sins to the surface, he'll have to confront his own inner demons once and for all.
Insightful and atmospheric, The House of Love and Death is a penetrating mystery with a plot that cuts straight to the dark heart of some of modern America's most pressing issues.
Now an original series from FX starring Jeff Bridges, John Lithgow, and Amy Brenneman: a former CIA officer, who's living off the grid, finds himself on the run from people who want to kill him--[a] harrowing hunt-and-hide adventure (The New York Times Book Review).
To all appearances, Dan Chase is a harmless retiree in Vermont with two big mutts and a grown daughter he keeps in touch with by phone. But most sixty-year-old widowers don't have multiple driver's licenses, savings stockpiled in banks across the country, or two Beretta Nanos stashed in the spare bedroom closet. Most have not spent decades on the run.
Thirty-five years ago, as a young army intelligence hotshot, Chase was sent to Libya to covertly assist a rebel army. When the plan turned sour, Chase acted according to his conscience--and triggered consequences he never could have anticipated. To this day, someone still wants him dead. And just when he thought he was finally safe, Chase is confronted with the history he spent much of his life trying to escape.
Edgar Award-winning author Thomas Perry writes thrillers that move almost faster than a speeding bullet (Wall Street Journal). The Old Man is his latest whip-smart standalone novel, and has been adapted into a critically acclaimed television series starring Jeff Bridges, John Lithgow, and Amy Brenneman.
Perry drives deep into Jack Reacher territory in this stand-alone [novel] . . . Swift, unsentimental, and deeply satisfying. --Kirkus Reviews
A red canoe sits abandoned on Seymour Rock, right where the Saugatuck River hits the Long Island Sound. The elegantly dressed corpse of a woman lies inside....
It's been two years since Nora Carleton left the job she loved at the US Attorney's Office to become lead counsel at Saugatuck Associates, the world's largest hedge fund. The career change also meant a change of scenery, relocating her to Westport, Connecticut, fifty miles north of New York City. But it was worth it to get her daughter, Sophie, away from the city. Plus, she likes the people she works with. Especially Helen, who recruited Nora because of her skills as an investigator.
Then Nora's new life falls apart when a coworker is murdered and she becomes the lead suspect. Nora calls in her old colleagues from the US Attorney's Office, Mafia investigator Benny Dugan and attorney Carmen Garcia. To clear Nora's name, Benny and Carmen hunt for the true killer's motive, but it seems nearly everyone at Saugatuck has secrets worth killing for. As Benny sets out to interrogate her colleagues, Nora examines her history with the company to determine who set her up to take the fall.
A suspenseful and intriguing tale of high finance and murder, Westport features the characters first introduced in James Comey's debut novel Central Park West but can also be read on its own. It further establishes Comey as a bold new talent in the mystery genre (Harlan Coben).
The world of Big Tech is full of eccentric characters, but shamanic billionaire Gerald Byrne may be the strangest of the bunch. The founder of Byrner, a global social media platform, Byrne is known for speaking with vague profundity and for dabbling in esoteric spiritual practices; he wears his hair in a long black ponytail to reveal a large flower tattooed on his neck; he's universally admired as a visionary, a philanthropist, and a devoted husband and father. And every person who gets in the way of his good work seems to die.
When a former student commits suicide, English professor and ex-spy Cameron Winter takes it upon himself to understand why. The young man was expelled from the university in an unfortunate episode that left Winter sympathetic to his plight; after a prolonged silence, he reached out to his teacher with two words just before taking the fatal plunge from the roof of his San Francisco apartment: Help me.
Winter has what he calls a strange habit of mind--the ability to imagine himself into a crime scene, to reconstruct it mentally and play through various possible causes and outcomes to understand exactly what took place. When he applies this exercise to Adam Kemp's desperate final moments, he discovers a troubling inconsistency. And when he learns that Kemp was in a tumultuous relationship with Gerald Byrne's niece, he begins to suspect that the suicide was the result of a carefully-engineered plot, put in motion by the powerful businessman.
Featuring the tough-but-learned protagonist from 2021's When Christmas Comes, A Strange Habit of Mind is a thrilling mystery set in the cutthroat world of tech money and tech influence, where unchecked fortunes produce unstoppable power for a lawless few.
Ambitious advice columnist Ginny Dugan knows she's capable of more than solving other people's beauty problems, but her boss at Photoplay magazine thinks she's only fit for fluff pieces. When she witnesses the kidnapping of a famous singer at Harlem's hottest speakeasy, nobody takes her seriously, but Ginny knows what she saw--and what she saw haunts her.
Guilt-ridden over her failure to stop the kidnappers and hard-pressed for cash to finally move out of her uptight showgirl sister's apartment, Ginny resolves to chase down the truth that will clear her conscience and maybe win her a promotion in the process. When private detective Jack Crawford starts interfering with her case, Ginny ropes him into a reluctant partnership but soon finds herself drawn to the kind heart she glimpses beneath his brooding exterior. Equally as alluring is Gloria Gardner, the star dancer of the Ziegfeld Follies who treats life like one unending party. Yet as Ginny delves deeper into the criminal underworld, the sinister plot she uncovers seems to lead right back to the theater.
Then a brutal murder strikes someone close to her, and Ginny realizes the stakes are higher than she ever imagined. This glamorous world has a deadly edge, and Ginny must shatter her every illusion to catch the shadowy killer before they strike again.
Stewart Hoagy Hoag always swore that he would never return to Oakmont, Connecticut, the small mill town where his family lived for generations. He certainly has no desire to interrupt his high life as the newest great American novelist to revisit the town that hates his family and will only bring back memories of his unhappy childhood. But when his childhood sweetheart phones to say that her mother, Mary McKenna, the librarian who inspired Hoagy's dream to be a writer, has died, Hoagy knows he has to return for her funeral. Especially when Maggie adds that her mother didn't die of natural causes.
Who would want to murder a beloved mill town librarian? Determined to pay his respects to one of the few people in his hometown he truly cared for, Hoagy hops in his Jaguar and heads to Oakmont with his new girlfriend Merilee and even newer basset hound puppy Lulu in tow. The town where his family's brass mill once thrived is now a toxic, lead-poisoned ghost town filled with illegal drugs, broken families, violence, bitterness, and resentment. Hoagy is surprised to discover former classmate and bullying target, Pete Schlosski, has become the State Police Resident Trooper. But while Pete seems to have forgiven his past tormentors, he doesn't have any ideas as to which of them might be a killer. Hoagy, on the other hand, has learned plenty about the art of investigation from hours spent in the library, and his four-month-old puppy shows a surprising knack for tracking down clues...
Readers will be delighted to return to where it all began and experience Lulu's very first case in this charming installment of the Edgar Award-nominated Stewart Hoag series.
Victor Silvius has spent nine years as an inmate at The Grange, a private sanatorium, for the crime of attacking judge Sir Giles Drury. Now, the judge's wife, Lady Elspeth Drury, believes that Silvius is the one responsible for a series of threatening letters her husband has recently received. Eager to avoid the scandal that involving the local police would entail, Lady Elspeth seeks out retired stage magician Joseph Spector, whose discreet involvement in a case Sir Giles recently presided over greatly impressed her.
Meanwhile, Miss Caroline Silvius is disturbed after a recent visit to her brother Victor, convinced that he isn't safe at The Grange. Someone is trying to kill him and she suspects the judge, who has already made Silvius' life a living hell, may be behind it. Caroline hires Inspector George Flint of Scotland Yard to investigate.
The two cases collide at Marchbanks, the Drury family seat of over four hundred years, where a series of unnerving events interrupt the peace and quiet of the snowy countryside. A body is discovered in the middle of a frozen pond without any means of getting there and a rifle is fired through a closed window, killing a man but not breaking the glass. Only Spector and his mastery of the art of misdirection can uncover the logical explanations for these impossible crimes.
An atmospheric and puzzling traditional mystery that pays homage to the greatest writers of the genre's Golden Age, Cabaret Macabre is the third book in Tom Mead's Joseph Spector series, hailed by the Wall Street Journal as a recipe for pure nostalgic pleasure. The books can be enjoyed in any order.
From a pool of over 3,000 considered stories published last year--anything that touched on crime, mystery, and suspense, from venues as disparate as The Strand Magazine, Dark Yonder, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, The Bellevue Literary Review, and more--these are the very best, selected by series editor Otto Penzler and guest editor Anthony Horowitz.
The tales included cover a range of styles, highlighting the diversity of subjects and forms comprising the genre we call mystery fiction. Featuring a mixture of household names, masters of the short form, and newcomers to the field, the collection offers a variety that promises something for every reader. And it's all capped off by a vintage story from the first half of the previous century, sourced directly from the rare book room at the Mysterious Bookshop, the oldest mystery fiction specialty store in the world.
Authors include:
Madeline Martin has built a life for herself as the young owner of a thriving business, The Next Chapter Bookshop, despite her tragic childhood and now needing to care for her infirm father. When Harley Granger, a failed novelist turned true crime podcaster, drifts into her shop in the days before Christmas, he seems intent on digging up events that Madeline would much rather forget. She's the only surviving victim of Evan Handy, the man who was convicted of murdering her best friend Steph, and is suspected in the disappearance of two sisters, also good friends of Madeline's, who have been missing for nearly a decade. It's an investigation that has obsessed her father Sheriff James Martin right up until his stroke took his faculties.
Harley Granger has a gift for seeing things that others miss. He wasn't much of a novelist, but his work as a true crime author and podcaster has earned him fame and wealth--and some serious criticism for his various unethical practices. Still, visiting Little Valley to be closer to his dying father has caused him to look into a case that many people think is closed--and some want reopened. And he has a lot of questions about the night Stephanie Cramer was killed, Ainsley and Sam Wallace disappeared, and Madeline Martin was left for dead, bleeding out on a riverbank.
Since Evan Handy went to jail, three other young women have gone missing, most recently a young college dropout named Lolly. Five young women missing in the same area in a decade. Are they connected? Was Evan Handy innocent after all? Or was there some else there that night? Someone who is still satisfying his dark appetites?
As Christmas approaches and a blizzard bears down, Madeline and her childhood friend Badger return to a past they both hoped was dead--to find the missing Lolly and to answer questions that have haunted them both, discovering that the truth is more terrible and much closer to home than they think.
Coupling a picturesque, cozy setting with a deeply unsettling suspenseful plot, Christmas Presents is a chilling seasonal novella that can be enjoyed all year long.