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
New York private eye Lydia Chin gets no respect. Not from her mother, who wishes she'd settle down with a nice Chinese husband; not from her patronizing brother Tim, counsel to Chinatown Pride, whose museum has been robbed of two crates of porcelains; not from Trouble, the dai lo of the Golden Dragons, who tells her he's sublet the protection franchise for Chinatown Pride's corner to the Main Street Boys (but then why haven't the Boys demanded their monthly payoff?) and then kicks her into a pile of garbage; and certainly not from the police, especially when they find out that she's hooked up two homicides—a Golden Dragon who probably pulled off the theft and a porcelain expert at the uptown Kurtz Museum—to the missing pieces without letting them in on the secret. Despite her Chinatown contacts and the hard work she puts in with her sometime partner (and sometime romantic partner) Bill Smith, Lydia's consistently behind the curve: first she doesn't know she's being followed, and then she doesn't know why or by whom; she doesn't know that the dead Golden Dragon had a close connection to Chinatown Pride, or that the dai lo of the Main Street Boys has a close connection to her; and she has no idea how many times, by how many different thieves, those porcelains have been stolen. There are so many culprits, in fact, that you may feel you're reading an Oriental remake of Murder on the Orient Express. But Rozan's fast-moving first novel presents her Asian-American cast and their world with a delicacy that goes far beyond local color.
Pub Date: Oct. 21, 1994
ISBN: 0-312-11254-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dr. Sarah Blakeney, the physician who's attended caustic Mathilda Gillespie for the past year, is shaken when her patient is found dead in her bathtub, doped with liquor and barbiturates, wrists slit, and an elaborate cast-iron gag, the scold's bridle, carefully arrayed with flowers and clasped over her face. But Sarah, unhappy in her own domestic life with her husband, Jack, a brilliant, unsuccessful painter, has no idea how close to home this calamity will strike. When Sarah tells Jack she wants a divorce, genre-wise readers will settle back in anticipation of a running analogy between Mathilda's savagely miserable life—she was impregnated by her idiot uncle when she was 13—and Sarah's present woes. They're in for as big a shock as Sarah when a videotaped last-minute will names her as sole legatee at the expense of Mathilda's beautiful, parasitical daughter, Joanna Lascelles, and her sulky, thieving granddaughter, Ruth. Suddenly the police are cordially interested in Sarah, the Lascelleses coolly enraged at her, charming Jack (who's gone to stay with Joanna while he paints her portrait) a mass of outrageous contradictions, and Mathilda desperately enigmatic. As all the principals begin sensitively, articulately, to torment themselves and each other with their guilty suspicions, Walters (The Sculptress, 1993, etc.) draws out the complications with a master's hand until the monstrous pattern is completed with a final sickening jolt. The combination of surgical precision and ferocity will leave you gasping. Those with a taste for the deceptively civilized British whodunit will find Walters the most exciting discovery in years. ($50,000 ad/promo; author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 20, 1994
ISBN: 0-312-11377-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1994
© Copyright 2025 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.
