Poison is the Wind That Blows, by C.W. Blackwell

 "Poison is the Wind That Blows," by C.W. Blackwell, in On Fire and Under Water, edited by Curtis Ippolito, Rock and a Hard Place Press, 2025.

Fighting forest fires is dangerous work.  Our nameless narrator is volunteered to do it because he is in prison for killing a man who was looting his house, and he wants to be a firefighter when he gets out.

But this conflagration is more dangerous than most because Reed, who is in charge of the prisoners, is looting houses.  He wants our hero to join his gang.  If he gets caught, he's due for a longer sentence and no career.  If he refuses, well, "Tragedies happen all the time."

Nicely suspenseful story. 

This Time Oughta Go Different, by Robert Mangeot

 

"This Time Oughta Go Different," by Robert Mangeot, in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, September/October 2025.

 This is the sixth appearance in this space by my fellow SleuthSayer.

Mangeot's stories are mostly about character and language.  For example, glom onto this opening paragraph. 

In need of his five o'clock Tanqueray and tonic, a dire need after an all-day mandatory ethics seminar, Vernon took his chances at the Hotel DeLuxa.  Nashville had gone hotter than hell's boiler room, and the DeLuxa offered the lone walkable glimmer of refinement in this South of Broadway wasteland.  A glimmer only.  The DeLuxa was sterile and grayed over, with not one velour cushion to ease Vernon's trick back moaning from the seminar's unforgiving stackable chair.  He'd been non-chargable all week, sidelined, and without much glimmer there on that turning around, either. 

 From this we know the location, the season, the tone, and mostly we know that our protagonist is an ethically-challenged lawyer  down on his luck.   

But wait! The bartender has a mild pain which Vernon is convinced can be stretched into a profitable workman's comp case.  The only problems are that the hotel seems to be mobbed up, the bartender isn't interested in suing, and, uh, she has disappeared.   

Okay, those issues might worry a lesser man than Vernon.  Or a less desperate one. 

Very funny story. 

What Ned Said, by Gary Phillips

 

"What Ned Said," by Gary Phillips, in Hollywood Kills, edited by Adam Meyer and Alan Orloff, Level Short, 2025.

Thanks to Kevin Tipple for catching some typos. 

This is the third time my friend Gary Phillips has appeared in this blog. 

I have said before that stories I like best tend to have at least one of four characteristics: great characters, twist ending, heightened language, or great premise.  We will go back to that.

I learned a new term from this story: grief tech.  As the British would say it is exactly what it says on the tin, meaning it is the use of advanced  technology to help with the mourning process. 

In this story it refers to Ethereal Essence, a company  which uses videos, text messages, and other mementos to create a virtual reality experience between the mourner and the deceased.  The mourner here is Clayton and the deceased is his old friend Ned.  They have a terrific session together - right up to the end when Ned tells his pal that he had been murdered.

And that, my friends, is what I call a great concept. A very enjoyable story.

 

Murder in F Sharp, by Stephen Ross

"Murder in F Sharp," by Stephen Ross, in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, September/October 2025.

This is the fourth appearance here for my fellow SleuthSayer Stephen Ross. 

There are plenty of cliche plots, or if you prefer tropes, that show up in mystery short stories.  I think I read two or three stories a year about a child - usually a boy - discovering a dead body and deciding to investigate.

That's how we start here but as always the question is what you do with the material. Ross uses it in highly original ways.

My name is Thomas Phipps, and I discovered a dead body today.

Thomas is sixteen and he doesn't have to investigate the murder because he has a strong suspicion about who did it.  And anyway, he has a bigger problem: his father wants him to keep taking classical piano lessons but Thomas wants to learn jazz.  Now that's an important issue.

As I have said before, sometimes I read the first sentence of a story and find myself hoping the author can keep up that quality to the end and be my best-of-the-week.  But this story belongs to the other extreme: I didn't know it was my Best until the next morning when I woke up, still thinking about it.  Fine work.