The Best American Mystery Stories 2018

August 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.

August 15, 2018
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."

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September 1, 2018
The 2018 edition of this essential mystery anthology benefits greatly from an enlightening foreword by Otto Penzler and an elegant introduction by editor Louise Penny. The short story as a literary form has been elevated to a higher level of regard in the twenty-first century, as evidenced by Alice Munro's 2013 Nobel Prize for her brilliant contributions to the genre. It has also reached a new level of popularity among mystery readers. Penzler points out that 40 mystery collections were published in 2017. The 20 stories selected for this year's collection include a Jack Reacher tale (at near-novella length) by Lee Child and fine work by Michael Connelly and James Lee Burke. Also among the highlights are Louis Bayard's poignant opening piece and Martin Lim�n's PX Christmas, featuring his series characters Sue�o and Bascom, as well as offerings by Joyce Carol Oates and Charlaine Harris, who are the only female authors represented. Not all the stories are what some readers might consider true mysteries, but they largely stick to Penzler's definition of crime fiction as any narrative in which a crime plays a key role. This series continues to belong in most library collections.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)