MURDER AND OBSESSION

The third entry in Penzler’s themed series of new stories (Murder for Revenge, 1998, etc.) is doubly generous. Though there are only 15 stories, a few are long enough to send the page count through the roof. And the topic itself is so broad that almost any crime story could be shoehorned in (though you’d have to stretch to find much obsession in Elmore Leonard’s arson investigation or much murder in Shel Silverstein’s droll sex-offender anecdote). No other individual entry measures up to Joyce Carol Oates’s “The Vampire,” but two kinds of stories are especially rewarding: a handful that focus, well, obsessively on their compulsive subjects (Edna Buchanan’s shoe fetishist, James W. Hall’s voyeur, Elizabeth George’s scheming modern champion of Richard III, Philip Friedman’s and Ed McBain’s city-dwellers who have diverse problems with dogs), and a pair of surprising, and surprisingly accomplished, wild-cards from regional specialists Dennis Lehane (who leaves Boston to vacation among some memorable southern lowlifes) and Michael Malone (whose path crosses Lehane’s as he travels north for a closer look at homicide among New York’s Four Hundred). Supporting performances by Kent Anderson, James Crumley, Anne Perry, and Amanda Cross make this an anthology with something for everyone.