The Mysterious Bookshop Presents the Best Mystery Stories of the Year

Starred review from July 26, 2021
The 20 entries in this superior anthology exhibit the storytelling gifts of authors both familiar and not. In David Morrell’s “Requiem for a Homecoming,” a masterpiece of suspense, two college friends reunite at the scene of a decades-old unsolved murder at their campus’s library in an effort to finally find the truth. Joyce Carol Oates takes readers on an unsettling journey inside the mind of a murderer in “Parole Hearing, California Institution for Women, Chino, CA,” which imagines the thoughts of a fictional disciple of Charles Manson as she appears before a parole board. David Marcum’s “The Adventure of the Home Office Baby,” a convincing Sherlock Holmes pastiche, masters the challenge of centering its plot on espionage rather than homicide. Members of a Manhattan jury become crime victims in Jacqueline Freimor’s ironic and moving “That Which Is True.” In Sue Grafton’s tense “If You Want Something Done Right,” an unpublished story found after her death, a wife is horrified to find that her purse, containing notes about doing away with her husband, has fallen into the wrong hands. This volume is a must for mystery aficionados.

July 15, 2024
Horowitz (the Hawthorne and Horowitz series) matches the variety of his own output with the 20 stories he’s selected for the thrilling latest installment of the Mysterious Bookshop’s annual anthology series. There’s something here for most mystery lovers’ tastes, including a twisty serial killer tale (Victor Methos’s “Kill Night”), a fair-play whodunit (Michael Bracken’s “Beat the Clock”), and a Southern neo-noir (Ace Atkins’s “Stunts”). Most of the contributors—save Atkins and Jeffrey Deaver—are not household names. John Floyd impresses with “Last Day at the Jackrabbit,” which repeatedly subverts readers’ expectations as diner waitress Elsie Williams gets multiple unpleasant surprises after a patron bearing a sinister resemblance to Don Vito Corleone enters the restaurant. In “Kill Night,” by Victor Mathos, a man picks up a rain-drenched hitchhiker in Utah, only to learn that his passenger has just cut off a woman’s hands before burying her alive. Shelley Costa’s “The Knife Sharpener,” a tense story of betrayal set on the eve of the Battle of Gettysburg, is another standout. The wealth of talent on display here augurs well for the future of intelligent, character-driven crime fiction. This is a must for mystery fans.

Starred review from August 1, 2024
In his foreword, series editor Penzler details his ""relentless quest"" to locate and read every crime fiction story published, while guest editor Anthony Horowitz (Close to Death, 2024) explores why he loves crime fiction (""Why does anyone?""), validating his answer with 20 mystery stories selected from a pool of 3,000 possibilities. The stories cover a satisfying range of styles and themes, embellished with notes from their authors. The most prominent author included is Jeffery Deaver, who remarks at the end of his urban noir entry "Lady in My Life": "A short story ... exists for one reason only. A breathtaking shock." And he certainly delivers. The opening piece by Ace Atkins is a riff from his Quinn Colson books and centers on Colson's Westerns-obsessed stuntman father, Jason. There is also a Hemingway-inspired rendering, "Last Day at the Jackrabbit," by John M. Floyd, while "Down the Fire Road," by Doug Crandell, is set in the North Georgia mountains where parts of Deliverance were filmed. Meanwhile, L. Frank Baum's "The Suicide of Kiaros," this year's featured vintage story, is one of the darkest tales in the anthology, and gives the reader pause to consider the dim underpinnings of his Oz saga. A must-read for short-story aficionados.

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