The Best American Mystery Stories (Best American Mystery Stories)

The award-winning author and Emmy-nominated television writer George Pelecanos serves as editor of the twelfth installment of this genre-expanding anthology, featuring twenty of the past years most enthralling, suspenseful, and slyly illuminating mystery stories.

A cut-and-dried case for a wily crime-scene reconstructionist is turned on its head in Michael Connellys “Mulholland Dive.” A terrible secret shared between two childhood friends resurfaces decades later as one of them lies on her deathbed in Alice Munros masterful “Childs Play.” James Lee Burke tells the haunting tale of a Hurricane Katrina evacuee who unexpectedly finds comfort from an unimaginable loss in “Mist.” And in Holly Goddard Joness “Proof of God,” a young mans car is repeatedly vandalized as proof that someone knows about the truths hed never willingly reveal.

As Pelecanos notes in his introduction, the twenty “original and unique voices” in this collection pay homage to the genres forebears by taking crime fiction into a thrilling new direction. “But make no mistake,” he says, “we are all standing on the shoulders of writers who came before us and left an indelible mark on literature through craftsmanship, care, and the desire to leave something of worth behind.”

Lawrence Block, Brendan DuBois, Loren D. Estleman,

Beth Ann Fennelly and Tom Franklin, Ed Gorman, Richard Lange, S. J. Rozan,

Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins, and others