Junk Feed, by Mark Stevens

 

"Junk Feed," by Mark Stevens, in Denver Noir, edited by Cynthia Swanson, Akashic Press, 2022.

The publisher sent me a free copy of this book.

A private eye story with a twist.  Wayne Furlong became a P.I. because he got laid off from his previous work as a newspaper restaurant critic.  Since he wrote under a pseudonym no one knows that he was the guy who wrote those vicious critiques - including his current client,  a hotel manager whose restaurant still hasn't recovered.

But the problem she hires him to deal with took place many floors above the dubious charms of the food shop.  A marketing guru had been decapitated in a hotel room a year ago and the crime had not been solved.  The manager hoped that if the killer is caught the bad attention, in the form of reporters and podcasters, would blessedly retreat.

Furlong approaches the problem with the exquisite eye for detail of an experienced food critic, and that is what makes the story unique.

The Tourist, by B.K.Stevens

"The Tourist," by B.K.Stevens, in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, July/August 2019.

This is the second appearance on this page by my fellow SleuthSayer,the late B.K. Stevens.


They'd brought him no joy, those first three murders...

So the story begins.

Where do you hide a leaf?  In a forest.  And of there is no forest?  You create one.  G.K. Chesterton had Father Brown say that that was a fearful sin. Ecologists might disagree, but now we are scrambling our metaphor.

Charles has decided to kill his annoying wife.  He want to disguise it as the work of a serial killer.  That means killing several other women first, creating his own forest, so to speak.

Of course, if you have read a few hundred crime stories you know something is going to go wrong with this clever plot.  The question is: what will the fatal problem be?  I certainly didn't see it coming.

My favorite part is that the event I expected to be the climax is tossed off in a sentence. Hell, in a clause.  Lovely bit of misdirection there,.

I don't know if this will be B.K.'s last published piece.  If so, it is a good note to go out on.