The year’s top 20 mystery stories offer a variety of delights, not the least of which are what Penny calls their “brilliant...
The bestselling author of the Chief Inspector Armand Gamache adventures selects this year’s outstanding short mystery fiction in the 22nd entry in Otto Penzler’s long-running series.
Penny, who writes only full-length novels, marvels at the compactness of short stories. And the stories she selects as the year’s best are, in her own words, “lean, muscular, graceful.” Even the longest have a clean, unitary narrative arc. In “Too Much Time,” Lee Child offers one more glimpse of Jack Reacher, whose offer to give the police a statement about a botched mugging he’s witnessed leads like a set of cascading dominoes to increasing peril. Alyce, the naïve college student in Joyce Carol Oates’ “Phantomwise: 1972,” finds herself caught in a web of events more mundane than Reacher’s but just as terrifying. These two stories, though compact, occupy more than 20 percent of the real estate here. David H. Hendrickson’s “Death in the Serengeti” chronicles a ranger’s battle with rhino poachers in Tanzania. Martin Limón’s “PX Christmas” pits GIs against human traffickers during the Korean War. And in Brian Silverman’s “Breadfruit,” the owner of a Caribbean watering hole is puzzled to find two examples of the island’s homely culinary staple sitting on his bar one morning. But some of the most poignant stories are set closer to home. Michael Connelly’s “The Third Panel” is set in an abandoned model home stranded in the desert outside Lancaster, California, and Louis Bayard’s “Banana Triangle Six,” in a single room of a nursing home; both offer a chilling look at people overpowered by their own misguided choices.
The year’s top 20 mystery stories offer a variety of delights, not the least of which are what Penny calls their “brilliant marriage of intellect, rational thought, and creativity.”Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-544-94909-6
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
As usual, Patterson (Cradle and All, p. 262, etc.) provides a nonstop alternation of felonies and righteous retribution...
Who’s robbing all those banks and kidnapping all those people and killing all those accomplices? It’s somebody calling himself the Mastermind—a comic-book sobriquet that represents everything that’s wrong with the latest installment in Patterson’s Alex Cross franchise.
A young woman robs a bank in suburban Maryland and threatens to kill the manager’s family if she’s kept from meeting her timetable. She’s less than a minute late out the door, so the family dies. So does the robber. So do all the staff at a second bank after somebody tips the police off. Who could possibly be so ruthless? It’s the Mastermind, the evil genius who set up both robberies intending murder from the beginning—even warning the cops the second time. And robbing banks is only the beginning for the megalomaniac, who’s plotting a group abduction worth $30 million and a series of maneuvers that’ll feed his cat’s-paws to the police, or to the fishes. And since the Mastermind likes to see families suffer, he vows to take the war of nerves right to forensic psychologist Cross. But if he wants to ruin the D.C. detective’s life, he’ll have to stand in line, since Cross’s girlfriend Christine Johnson is pulling away from him and his daughter Jannie is suddenly having seizures. Despite his prowess with guns and fists, and his awesome insight into other people’s minds, Cross would be desperate if it weren’t for the timely embraces of FBI agent Betsey Cavalierre, to whom he’ll make passionate love while telling her, “I like being with you. A lot. Even more than I expected.” With an adversary like that, how can the Mastermind prevail?
As usual, Patterson (Cradle and All, p. 262, etc.) provides a nonstop alternation of felonies and righteous retribution unclouded by texture, thought, or moral complexity, to produce the speediest tosh on the planet.Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2000
ISBN: 0-316-69325-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2000
Rowling proves once again that she’s a master of plotting over the course of a series; you can see her planting seeds,...
In her second pseudonymous outing as Galbraith, J.K. Rowling continues her examination of fame—those who want it, those who avoid it, those who profit from it.
Cormoran Strike, Rowling’s hard-living private eye, isn’t as close to the edge as he was in his first appearance, The Cuckoo’s Calling (2013). His success at proving supermodel Lula Landry was murdered has brought him more clients than he can handle—mostly businessmen who think their lovers are straying and divorcing wives looking for their husbands’ assets—and he’s even rented a small apartment above his office near Charing Cross Road. His accidental temp–turned-assistant, Robin Ellacott, is dying to stretch her investigative muscles, but she has to deal with her fiance, Matthew, who still wishes she’d taken that better-paying job in human resources. Then odd sad-sack Leonora Quine comes in asking Strike to find her missing husband, Owen, a fading enfant terrible novelist. Strike soon discovers that Owen had written a baroque fantasy novel in which he exposed the secrets of everyone he knows—including his editor, publisher and a famous writer with whom he had a falling out years earlier—and his agent had just sent it out for consideration. Rowling has great fun with the book industry: Editors, agents and publishers all want to meet the detective, but only over lunches at fancy restaurants where he’s expected to foot the bill. It’s no big surprise when Strike finds the writer’s dead body—though it’s certainly gruesome, as someone killed him in the same extravagantly macabre way he disposed of the villain of his unpublished book. As Strike tries to figure out who murdered Owen, the writer is splashed across the front pages of the tabloids in a way he would have loved when he was alive, while the detective tries to play down his own growing fame.
Rowling proves once again that she’s a master of plotting over the course of a series; you can see her planting seeds, especially when it comes to Robin, which can be expected to bear narrative fruit down the line. It will be a pleasure to watch what happens.Pub Date: June 19, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-316-20687-7
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Mulholland Books/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
