The only pleasure this doorstop-sized package doesn’t deliver, in fact, is a surer sense of AHMM’s particular cachet. But...
Thirty-four stories culled from Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, the venerable monthly that’s played second fiddle to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine for half a century.
Why are anthologies of reprints so often more rewarding than collections of new material? Partly because, as editor Landrican puts it, “50 years is a lot of stories.” With hundreds of entries to choose from, it’s easy to skip mediocre competitors in favor of Edward D. Hoch’s impossible defenestration “The Long Way Down” and Steve Hockensmith’s farewell-to-the-force, “Erie’s Last Day.” Partly because there’s a particular pleasure in savoring great names from the past like Jim Thompson and Charles Willeford or reminding yourself that classics like Lawrence Block’s “A Candle for the Bag Lady” and Sara Paretsky’s “The Takamoku Joseki” first saw the light in AHMM, creating a mutual glow by association. Partly because only a collection of oldies can resurrect forgotten gems like Ed Lacy’s neatly turned “The ‘Method’ Sheriff” and Stephen Wasylyk’s “The Search for Olga Bateau,” in which a hard-bitten reporter is softened by an unsolved case from the past. And partly for the thrill of rediscovering early stories by Bill Pronzini, Doug Allyn and S.J. Rozan before they hit the big time.
The only pleasure this doorstop-sized package doesn’t deliver, in fact, is a surer sense of AHMM’s particular cachet. But maybe that lack of any specific house style is its greatest strength.Pub Date: June 15, 2006
ISBN: 1-933648-03-1
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2006
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
More of a western than a mystery, like most of Joe’s adventures, and all the better for the open physical clashes that...
Wyoming Game and Fish Warden Joe Pickett (Free Fire, 2007, etc.), once again at the governor’s behest, stalks the wraithlike figure who’s targeting elk hunters for death.
Frank Urman was taken down by a single rifle shot, field-dressed, beheaded and hung upside-down to bleed out. (You won’t believe where his head eventually turns up.) The poker chip found near his body confirms that he’s the third victim of the Wolverine, a killer whose animus against hunters is evidently being whipped up by anti-hunting activist Klamath Moore. The potential effects on the state’s hunting revenues are so calamitous that Governor Spencer Rulon pulls out all the stops, and Pickett is forced to work directly with Wyoming Game and Fish Director Randy Pope, the boss who fired him from his regular job in Saddlestring District. Three more victims will die in rapid succession before Joe is given a more congenial colleague: Nate Romanowski, the outlaw falconer who pledged to protect Joe’s family before he was taken into federal custody. As usual in this acclaimed series, the mystery is slight and its solution eminently guessable long before it’s confirmed by testimony from an unlikely source. But the people and scenes and enduring conflicts that lead up to that solution will stick with you for a long time.
More of a western than a mystery, like most of Joe’s adventures, and all the better for the open physical clashes that periodically release the tension between the scheming adversaries.Pub Date: May 20, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-399-15488-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2008
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