Being Alive, by Brian Cox

 "Being Alive," by Brian Cox, in Every Day A Little Death: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Song of Stephen Sondheim, edited by Josh Pachter, Level Best Books, 2025.

 This is the second story I have reviewed here by Cox. 

There are many classic story premises in our field.  Spouse wants to kill spouse (one editor said that is the plot she sees submitted the most often). The cop haunted by one specific case. The thief forced or persuaded to commit One Last Job (more common in action movies than print, I think.)  The private eye trying to help an old friend.

And the retired spy whose past has caught up.  That's the one we face today.

Jones left the Company after an operation went disastrously wrong.  Now he spends his time fishing in a rural community.  But things change when he gets a box of fishing gear from his old supervisor.

Then an old colleague arrives with news about that botched mission and the fact that that former supervisor recently died in an accident.  Jones' past is catching up fast...

A nicely suspenseful story that took me by surprise.

The Surrogate Initiative, by Brian Cox

"The Surrogate Initiative," by Brian Cox, in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, September/October 2019.

One of the many things I like about AHMM is that they are willing to push genre boundaries.  They occasionally publish a western, science fiction, or even fantasy story if it has a strong crime element.

Take this tale as an example.  It tells of the first criminal case decided by a jury of AI surrogates.  Nobody wants to be called to jury duty so computer programs are developed with the personalities of potential jurors.  Unlike their real life counterparts they never get sick, or bored, they automatically understand all the technical jargon of expert witnesses and their biases can be tuned by the judge. 

Could it ever happen?  Probably not.  But it's fascinating to think about it, and Cox's story provides several twists along the way to what might be justice.