A mostly excellent short-story collection containing some really fine writing. One tale, "Souls Burning," may be one of the best short stories I have ever read. The stories in this book were originally published over a span of more than 30 years, and it's interested to see how they reflect the changes in the mystery genre as the years progress. A few of the early stories in particular suffer a bit from the constraints of the Mystery genre, with clues peppered into the story so obsessive puzzle-solvers can get excited and "solve" the crime. The second story in the book typifies this: first published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, the story relies upon wordplay with one character's name to reveal the murderer. It's a stretch at the least. Sometimes these clues are way too obvious. Two jackets instead of one? Okay, that guy did it. Blond hair instead of red? That's no red herring. But most of the time Pronzini escapes this cliche and gives us a detective worthy of the job title. Like all too many eBook editions of old titles, this has obviously been scanned and OCR'ed from a printed edition -- and it shows. The book is peppered with odd characters the scanner didn't recognize and replaced with question marks. Quite a few other scanning errors / typos lurk throughout the book. One that sticks in my mind is what should have been the words "tom cat" that show up as "torn cat." The author deserved better.
