Lock your door and enjoy.
Fourteen stories, originally published between 1930 and 1949, in which valuables are stolen from impregnable strongholds, victims are poisoned through inexplicable means, and, of course, murderers escape from rooms locked from the inside.
As Penzler warns in his introduction, readers “will inevitably be disappointed” by magic tricks whose logistics are eventually, and necessarily, explained in detail. The greatest feat of prestidigitation here, in fact, may be the lack of overlap with Penzler’s monumental 2014 collection The Black Lizard Big Book of Locked-Room Mysteries. Although 10 authors are represented in both volumes, only one story, Ellery Queen’s novella The House of Haunts, also known as The Lamp of God, is duplicated—and no wonder, since this tale of a house that disappears overnight continues to impress despite its wild implausibilities. The other extended story, John Dickson Carr’s The Third Bullet, is cluttered, convoluted, and much less sharp than Carr’s many locked-room novels. The rest of the stories, good but not great, include Cornell Woolrich’s brisk, efficient “Murder at the Automat,” MacKinlay Kantor’s brief, pungent “The Light at Three O’Clock,” Manly Wade Wellman’s frantically paced “Murder Among Magicians,” Fredric Brown’s “Whistler’s Murder,” most notable for its wonderful last line, Mignon G. Eberhart’s not-so-impossible “The Calico Dog,” C. Daly King’s how-did-he-escape puzzle “The Episode of the Nail and the Requiem,” Craig Rice’s “His Heart Could Break,” in which lawyer John J. Malone identifies the person who hanged his jailed client, Erle Stanley Gardner’s “The Exact Opposite,” a rapid-fire tale of professional thief Lester Leith, and Anthony Boucher’s inverted tale of time-traveling murder. Best in show: Clayton Rawson’s “Off the Face of the Earth,” a deft double disappearance solved and partly executed by the Great Merlini, and Joseph Commings’ “Fingerprint Ghost,” which asks which suspect shrugged off a straitjacket to kill a magician.
Lock your door and enjoy.Pub Date: July 5, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-61316-328-3
Page Count: 508
Publisher: American Mystery Classics
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2022
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.
A sequel to The Grey Wolf (2024) that begins with the earlier novel’s last line: “We have a problem.” And what a problem it is.
Now that Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his allies in and out of the Sûreté du Québec have saved Canada’s water supply from poisoning on a grand scale, you might think they were entitled to some rest and relaxation in Three Pines. No such luck. Don Joseph Moretti, the Sixth Family head who ordered the hit-and-run on biologist Charles Langlois that nearly killed Gamache as well, is plotting still more criminal enterprises, and Gamache can’t be sure that Chief Inspector Evelyn Tardiff, who’s been cozying up to Moretti in order to get the goods on him, hasn’t gone over to the dark side herself. In fact, Gamache’s uncertainty about Evelyn sets the pattern for much of what follows, for another review of one of Langlois’ notebooks reveals a plot so monstrous that it’s impossible to be sure who’s not in on it. Is it really true, as paranoid online rumors have it, that “Canada is about to attack the U.S.”? Or is it really the other way around, as the discovery of War Plan Red would have it? As the threats loom larger and larger, they raise questions as to whether the Black Wolf, the evil power behind them, is Moretti, disgraced former Deputy Prime Minister Marcus Lauzon, whom Gamache has arranged to have released from prison, or someone even more highly placed. A brief introductory note dating Penny’s delivery of the uncannily prophetic manuscript to September 2024 will do little to assuage the anxieties of concerned readers.
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781250328175
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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