The Best American Mystery Stories 2018: A Mystery Collection

by Louise Penny (Editor), Otto Penzler (Editor)

Overview

#1 New York Times best-selling author of the Chief Inspector Armand Gamache novels, Louise Penny brings her “nerve and skill—as well as heart” (Maureen Corrigan, Washington Post) to selecting the best short mystery and crime fiction of the year.

Writing short stories takes “Skill. Discipline. Knowledge of the form while not being formulaic,” contends Louise Penny in her introduction. “In a short story there is nowhere to hide. Each must be original, fresh, inspired.” Originality is just what’s in store for readers of the twenty clever, creative selections in The Best American Mystery Stories 2018. There’s no hiding from a Nigerian confidence game, a drug made of dinosaur bones, a bombing at an oil company, a reluctant gunfighter in the Old West, and the many other scams, dangers, and thrills lurking in its suspenseful pages.
 
The Best American Mystery Stories 2018 includes T. C. Boyle, James Lee Burke, Lee Child, Michael Connelly, Charlaine Harris, Andrew Klavan, Martin Limón, Joyce Carol Oates, and others.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780544949096
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	10/02/2018
Series:	Best American Mystery Stories Series
Pages:	432
Sales rank:	466,393
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

OTTO PENZLER is a renowned mystery editor, publisher, columnist, and owner of New York’s The Mysterious Bookshop, the oldest and largest bookstore solely dedicated to mystery fiction. He has edited more than fifty crime-fiction anthologies. He lives in New York.

Editorial Reviews

08/13/2018
Despite the presence of guest editor Penny, general editor Otto Penzler’s mixed 22nd annual best-of volume heavily favors male writers; only two of the 20 contributors are women—Joyce Carol Oates and Charlaine Harris, both big names who turn in middling tales. That said, the 18 male-authored tales certainly include some gems. Lee Child’s witty “Too Much Time,” starring Jack Reacher, showcases his talents as a short-form author. Andrew Klaven’s “All Our Yesterdays” turns a well-worn genre trope on its head in a haunting story of a recovering WWI vet. And Andrew Bourelle’s goofy-sounding “Y Is for Yangchuan Lizard” is as bleak a noir exercise as they come. Other selections fall flat, such as Paul D. Marks’s “Windward,” a Venice Beach PI story that feels like an unintentional pastiche of the genre’s worst excesses. Crime aficionados will be entertained, but anyone expecting this anthology to make the case for the state of mystery short fiction being as solid as it is in novels will be disappointed. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

"This essential mystery anthology benefits greatly from an enlightening foreword by Otto Penzler and an elegant introduction by editor Louise Penny...This series continues to belong in most library collections."—Booklist "Crime aficionados will be entertained."—Publishers Weekly —

From the Publisher

2018-07-31

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."

Kirkus Reviews