Doing a bit of genre-related research, I recently revisited BAMS 2002 and 2003. As might be expected, both anthologies are mixed bags. The best of these crime/mystery stories offer a refreshing contrast to the stories of, say, Annie Proulx or Donald Ray Pollack — they portray toughness and despai...
This year’s worth of the most powerful, the most startling, the smartest and most astute, in short, the best crime journalism. Scouring hundreds of publications, Otto Penzler and Thomas H. Cook have created a remarkable compilation containing the best examples of the most current and vibrant of o...
I had always heard that Ed McBain could craft a good story; FIDDLERS was my introduction to his style. To be honest, when I first started reading this book, I was unsure about it. There seemed to be too many things going on, too many characters. The initial plot, a serial (I would say mass mur...
Although Cook's works tend to be too retrospective for my taste, it works for this book. In between chapters, the main character (David) is trying to explain his situation. Each chapter is a narration on what's going on in David's life, but the entire book is plagued by flashbacks of his childhoo...
This year's guest editor, Sue Grafton, has put together a wonderfully diverse collection of stories to surprise and satisfy all fans of the genre. In this volume, best-selling writers such as Mary Higgins Clark, Walter Mosley, Lawrence Block, Jay McInerney, and Donald E. Westlake stand alongside ...
Average ratings of John Shannon's Jack Liffey series are rather low and no wonder - these are not your typical mystery novels. Usually, readers of mysteries go for the plot and rate books by intricacy, twistedness, speed, and unpredictability of the stories. Mr. Shannon. instead, is a sort of a m...
In the gripping fifth novel of what the Philadelphia Inquirer calls a "lean and literate" crime series, Jack Liffey—the rough-edged, compassionate private detective who garners even more enthusiastic reviews and fans with each new case—once again searches the volatile and dangerous ethnic communi...
Original stories include: Terrible Tommy Terhune by Lawrence Block Tennis Anyone by Kinky Freeman Six Love by James W. Hall Promise by John Harvey A Debt to the Devil by Jeremiah Healy Stephen Longacre's Greatest Match by Stephen Hunter No Strings by Judith Kelman A Killer Overhead by Robert Leuc...
Lawrence Block, in Keller by a Nose," asks what obsession holds more hazards than betting on the ponies. The answer will surprise you...Max Allan Collins's "That Kind of Nag" proves that it's bad to play the wrong horse, but worse to pick the wrong woman..."The Great, the Good and the Not-So-Good...
Gag neither. I’ll give her that. But after looking flinty-eyed at the body for a minute or more, both of ’em still as stumps, she did stare me straight in the face while we talked, so as not to get another eyeful by accident. That staring was, I figure, more discomfiting for me than seeing a corp...
Lester pulled me out of all that and gave me work. I mean, when you hit the pit, somebody reaches down and pulls you out, gives you that new lease, you owe him, owe him big-time. So when Lester tells me, “I think my only child, Laura, is being abused, humiliated, by this character she worships.” ...
ROBERT B. PARKER: I dunno. I think people just like the way it sounds. THAT’S A WONDERFULLY quotable exchange, and I wish I could be sure I was quoting it correctly. I wasn’t there when these words were spoken. It was passed on to me second- or third-hand, but what I heard...
Sweat streaked sunburned faces and soaked their prison blues. To the west, the sun had grown huge and crimson as it nipped the horizon; broken strings of pink clouds, the tops darkening to purple and black, drifted above its crest. Ramsey hadn’t seen it from such a perspective, not segmented by c...
The Caffeys lived in a modest cabin set deep in the woods along a one-lane gravel road outside Alba, a rural community of 492 people halfway between Sulphur Springs and Tyler. Most folks around Alba and Emory, the nearby county seat, knew the family; Penny played piano at Miracle Faith Baptist Ch...
Joan H. ParkerandRobert B. Parker The lettering on the door said GALAHAD, INC. When Jamal Jones opened the door and went in, there were two white people. The woman was blond with big blue eyes and a wide mouth. Jamal stared at her for a moment. Bitchin’ body. The man was tall and had a mustache. ...
just before his twentieth birthday while a medical student at Moscow University. His stories number in the hundreds, many of which have never been translated and some never even included in his collected works in Russia. His only novel, The Shooting Party (1884) was published in the same year tha...
cried the dame they called Trixie. “Hey, Sarge. That you? Yeah! Over here.” Sarge ambled over. Reluctantly. “What is it this time, Trixie?” “It’s Moose and that bunch.” Sarge let out a long sigh. “Moose Murphy?” “Yeah, yeah. Murphy. Him and his trouble boys have been bothering that old guy, you k...
I said. “Remember what I told you about him,” Susan said. “Were you a good boxer?” “Not good enough,” I said. “While I was still fighting, I took the police exam and passed and decided to do that.” “Were you good at that?” “No, too many rules.” “So you quit,” Amy said. “I did,” I said. “I ...
At length he spoke. “Of all the cases we have had to deal with, Watson, none touches us more nearly than this.” He tossed over a damp copy of the Mail, with an American despatch reading as follows: ARTIST SUSPECTED OF MURDER New York, March 27. (AP) The partially dismembered body of Elijah J. Gro...
Cook The paired numbers shot through his mind in quick metallic bursts, the dry slap of bullets hitting beach sand. It is the way he’d lived, like a man under fire, raked by numbers, no trees to shield him, no foxholes, only the endless open beach, with no sun or moon above him, just the melancho...
J. Raffles, the gentleman jewel thief created by E. W. Hornung at the end of the Victorian era, his first book appearance being in The Amateur Cracksman (1899). A few years after the author’s death in 1921, the popularity of the character remained at such a high level that the British magazine Th...
O’Neill, who lost his life at the World Trade Center on September 11, begins with a story by Richard A. Clarke, the national coordinator for counterterrorism in the White House from the first Bush administration until last year. On a Sunday morning in February 1995, Clarke went to his office to r...