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Picking the "best" of anything is difficult, and is always a subjective exercise, but senior editor Otto Penzler and guest editor James Patterson have compiled twenty strong short stories in the 19th volume of The Best American Mystery Stories.
There's a mix of well-known authors, such as Lee Child, Michael Connelly and Dennis Lehane, as well as some lesser-known authors, such as Tomiko M. Breland, Janette Turner Hospital and Eric Rutter.
Breland, who is just beginning her literary career, gives us "Rosalee Carrasco," which revolves around a middle-school incident and its impact on the lives of the five girls involved, with a great twist at the end. Hospital, who wrote "Afterlife of a Stolen Child," has won multiple awards in Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom, but she is new to U.S. readers. Hospital based her story on a real life Long Island, New York, story that involved a kidnapped child and a man who, years later, came forward to say he was that child. Her story is told from multiple viewpoints: mother, father, sister, kidnapper, witness and, of course, the man who believes himself to be the stolen child. It's a disturbing, yet poignant, story.
Rutter's "The Shot" closes out this anthology, and it's a fine entry on which to end. It's a character-driven story about a police sniper who begins to question his life choices. As the author writes, he finds the "drama more powerful in a story that arises from some personal conflict." That's certainly the case in Rutter's offering.
Fans of Connelly and Lehane will be happy to see the two authors teaming up in "Red Eye," which brings their protagonists - Harry Bosch and Patrick Kenzie - together in one case. Author Jeffrey Deaver gives us shades of Sherlock Holmes in "The Adventure of the Laughing Fisherman," about a socially inept man who can ferret out clues. We get a noirish story from Lee Child in "Wet with Rain," which comes out of a family legend (that Child's grandparents sold their house to a couple named Morrison; the couple had a child named Ivan, who went on to become musician Van Morrison).
The anthology is heavy on the psychology of crime. As Penzler writes in the foreword, many of the authors "have described how antisocial solutions to difficult situations may occur, and why perpetrators feel that their violent responses to conflicts seem appropriate."
Indeed, this makes for an interesting set of edgy stories. It's a collection you'll want to savor at leisure.
§ Lourdes Venard is a newspaper editor in Long Island, N.Y.
Reviewed by Lourdes Venard, November 2015
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