The World's Finest Mystery and Crime Stories

September 20, 2004
Gorman and Greenberg's hefty and satisfyingly diverse anthology gathers 32 crime stories first published in 2003, along with six succinct introductory surveys of the mystery scene for that year. The opener, Kathyrn Rusch's low-key yet arresting "Cowboy Grace Kristine," tells of a wallflower who leaves town to make a new life, only to be tracked down for a crime she didn't know she was involved with. Anthony Mann's hilarious "Esther Gordon Framlingham" sends up the genre, as a writer desperately attempts to sell his agent on a new mystery series concept, offering, among other ideas for a hero, "A dominant Neanderthal male at the time of the Cro-Magnon." The agent responds: "Marlene Trent's Ug Oglog novels. You mean to say you don't know them?" Other stories range from Elizabeth Foxwell's gritty "No Man's Land," set in the female ambulance corps in WWI, and David Edgerly Gates's western thriller "Aces & Eights," to Liza Cody's postmodern "Woke Up This Morning." A few tales are less compelling, such as Edward Hoch's "The Face of Ali Baba," in which the hunt for an Osama bin Laden figure uses trivial clues from the Arabian Nights
. Veteran crime writers Jeremiah Healy, Joyce Carol Oates, Sharyn McCrumb, Clark Howard and John Lutz also highlight this impressive new addition to the series.

Starred review from October 14, 2002
There might be some undiscovered gem of a short story published in 2001 that didn't make it into this impressively eclectic third annual collection, but it's hard to see how it slipped under the eagle-eyed radar of editors Gorman and Greenberg (and their deputies Larry Segriff and John Helfers, credited in the dedication as the people "who do 99 percent of the work"). The lively mix ranges from works by the usual prolific novelist suspects—S.J. Rozan, Ed McBain, Joyce Carol Oates, Jeffery Deaver, Donald E. Westlake, Ruth Rendell, Bill Pronzini, Marcia Muller, Val McDermid—to the welcome return of names (like Joseph Hansen and Clark Howard) not seen often enough on book jackets of late. Howard's story, "The California Contact," has enough rich material for a novel—including a hero who would rather be a boxer than a cop, a hit man called "the Leper" who "could not be identified by fingerprinting because all of his prints and part of several fingers had been eaten away by leprosy," and a beautifully orchestrated finale at Disneyland. Carolyn Wheat's "The Only Good Judge" offers a complicated, Hitchcockian plot, in which three villains commit each other's crimes, as well as some valuable wisdom about the erroneous image of judges as shaped by the Law & Order
TV series. With seven fact-and-opinion-packed reports on the world crime fiction scene, this anthology contains enough high quality reading material to sustain any genre addict's habit.