Home to Roost, by Holly Schofield

 

"Home to Roost," by Holly Schofield, in Black Cat Weekly, #195.

I admit to a little bias on this choice.  The story would have fit perfectly in the anthology I edited last year, Crimes Against Nature: New Stories of Environmental Villainy.  The theme resonates with me.

Kate and Rob are the RCMP constables operating on a small island off the coast of British Columbia, an island suffering from an assortment of environmental crises. They are investigating the death of Bert McCandless, who is an ecological disaster all on his lonesome. He's the sort of guy who would cut down protected trees with a chainsaw - during a period of high wildfire risk.  

But now Bert is dead, in a bizarre incident that might be murder, accident, or even suicide.  There are plenty of possible clues but can Kate tie them together?

I won't say more except that the story is well-written and cleverly plotted.

The Grim, by Donna Andrews

"The Grim," by Donna Andrews, in Black Cat Weekly, #165.

This is Andrews' second appearance here. 

What we have this week is a fantasy-detective story.  Not the easiest mashup to make work, but I enjoyed it.

The narrator, nameless unless I missed it, is in charge of spooks in his area and a problem has come up, wouldn't you know it, in the busy season right before Halloween.

A few weeks ago I talked about world-building, and this is another example, although we might call this other-world-building, because we are discussing the rules of the afterlife.  It turns out that the first body buried in a cemetery can't leave it. It becomes the Grim, a fierce black dog which guards the graves and helps new spirits to find their way to the underworld.

For this reason, the narrator explains, wise cemetery-managers bury a dog before they bury other humans.  Because no person is likely to want the job of death-pooch.

In our story the problem is that the Grim at a new cemetery is clearly suffering from job dissatisfaction and is causing trouble.  Our hero has to figure out the cause of Fido's dilemma and find a solution.  

His work is satisfactory and so is the story.

 

 

Under Hard Rock, by Ed Teja

 "Under Hard Rock," by Ed Teja, in Black Cat Weekly, #164.

This  is a good example of what I call the Unknown Narrator story. The master, though probably not inventor, of the subgenre, was Jack Ritchie who won an Edgar for such a one.  In this type of tale all the reader  knows about the main character (usually the narrator) is what he or other people say about him, and that turns out not to be true.

In this case the narrator makes it clear early on that he is lying to the people he meets but that intrigues you; you  want to know what's really going on. He visits a small mining town and says he is a private eye, hired to find a man named Randall Cook.  But when the owner of the town's only restaurant tells him that Cook died a week before we find out that he already knew that.  So what's going on?

Cook died in a mining accident and it seems impossible that it could have been a murder.  And he had no obvious enemies.  What exactly is our hero hoping to learn - and what is there to learn?

Part of the solution is a little weak in my opinion. (It requires someone to be awfully gullible.) But it was enjoyable and avoided the usual cliches. 

The Hanging Judge, by Dave Zeltserman

 "The Hanging Judge," by  Dave Zeltserman, in Black Cat Weekly, #163, 2024.

World-building is a topic that gets discussed a lot among writers of science fiction and fantasy, but not so much  in mystery.  The assumption there is you are trying to set your story in the world we live in.  (Historical mysteries are different, especially if they are set in the distant past where we have to speculate about how people lived.)

But this story is all about world-building.  Of course, it is a fantasy mystery. Mike Stone begins by telling us "I might be hell's only operating private eye."     

So the world Zeltserman has to show us is hell, but not just any ol' Hades.  It turns out that every resident with a strong enough personality or "enough self-awareness" generates his or her own private hell, and can drag less aware persons into it.

Stone's problem is that he isn't getting any business.  (Well, his bigger problem is that he's in hell, and the worst part of that, he explains, is the monotony.  So having no business is a real drag.)  He concludes that the problem might be that he did a lousy job on an earlier case, and "everything has consequences in hell."  So Stone sets out to determine, this time for sure, who killed his client, a corrupt judge.

No need for me to detail his investigation.  You either enjoy this sort of thing or you don't.  I enjoyed it very much.