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Overview: Series editor Penzler’s preference for trolling literary journals instead of relying on the usual mystery magazines and anthologies pays big dividends. Not a single one of the 20 reprints here is a dud. Standouts among the stories produced by mystery veterans are James Lee Burke’s parable of a prison-camp inmate who refuses to box (Big Midnight Special); Chuck Hogan’s account of the hamburger that will be a condemned convict’s last meal (Two Thousand Volts); and Kristine Kathrine Rusch’s historical fantasy of a killer whose methodical execution of FBI agents reaches all the way to the top (G-Men). But there’s excellent, if more formulaic work by Clark Howard, Rob Kantner, Robert McClure and Michael Connelly. Free Radicals, Alice Munro’s unexpected riff on a classic Agatha Christie story, tops the literary side, which provides a good deal more variety: Tom Bissell’s portrait of a modern superhero (My Interview with the Avenger); Ron Carlson’s tale of a Guatemalan baseball phenom whose fate is fatally linked to his scout’s (Beanball); M.M.M. Hayes’s depiction of a crusty old gentleman’s unusual strategies for coping with change and death (Meantime, Quentin Ghlee); Randy Rohn’s droll, creepy account of The Man Who Fell in Love with the Stump of a Tree; Jonathan Tel’s story about a trucker whose life is upended by an accusation of rape and murder (Bola de la Fortuna); and series favorite Joyce Carol Oates’ Dear Husband, the feverish confession of a dying family-killer. N.J. Ayres, Alafair Burke, David Corbett, Nic Pizzolatto, Gary Craig Powell and Vu Tran round out the diverse list. A choice mix of solid work from mystery specialists and one-shots from authors who’d never want to be identified with the genre.
Genre: Fiction > Mystery/Thriller > Best American Mystery Anthologies
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