However fast or slow they go, however, connoisseurs of this eccentric, demanding form will find this an indispensable...
Purists be warned: This latest XXXL-sized anthology from veteran editor Penzler (The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries, 2013, etc.) should really be titled The Black Lizard Big Book of Impossible Crimes.
Not that fans of the most distinctive strain of golden-age plotting will be disappointed, for even if locked rooms appear in only a fraction of these 68 reprints, here is God’s plenty. After they skip the seven endlessly anthologized entries by Edgar Allan Poe, Wilkie Collins, Arthur Conan Doyle, Jacques Futrelle, Melville Davisson Post and Lord Dunsany, readers will be able to choose among shootings from Agatha Christie to Bill Pronzini, stabbings from R. Austin Freeman to John Lutz, disappearances from E.C. Bentley to H.R.F. Keating, impossible thefts, impossible poisonings, and no fewer than six stories featuring corpses found in the sand or snow with no footprints indicating the presence of a killer. Penzler, who provides introductions to every story, includes one by John Dickson Carr, the acknowledged master of the genre, one by his alter ego Carter Dickson, and three by his most prolific disciple, Edward D. Hoch. Nostalgia buffs will be reunited with Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, Clayton Rawson and Edmund Crispin, along with ancient debut stories by Judson Phillips (aka Hugh Pentecost, who’s also represented) and James Yaffe. More adventurous explorers will find that writers as diverse as P.G. Wodehouse, MacKinlay Kantor, Dashiell Hammett, Erle Stanley Gardner, Leslie Charteris, Georges Simenon, William Irish, Fredric Brown, Lawrence Block and Stephen King have all in their time created impossible crimes and solved them neatly. And that’s the biggest limitation of this behemoth collection: Unlike locked-room novels, which can pleasurably tease readers for hundreds of pages before taking them behind the curtain, short stories barely have time to lay out the impossible circumstances before the solution is due. Better not subject yourself to more than one or two of these parlor tricks at a sitting.
However fast or slow they go, however, connoisseurs of this eccentric, demanding form will find this an indispensable resource, a pearl beyond price.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-307-74396-1
Page Count: 956
Publisher: Vintage Crime/Black Lizard
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2014
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
© 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.
