Death of Another Hero, by Susan Daly

"Death of Another Hero," by Susan Daly, in Ellen Hart Presets: Malice Domestic 15: Murder Most Theatrical, edited by Verona Rose, Rita Owen, and Shawn Reilly Simmons, Wildside Press, 2020.

This is the second appearance in this space by Susan Daly. 

Once upon a time a local theatre group did a new version of Much Ado About Nothing to celebrate the town's hundredth anniversary.  Twenty-five years later they decide to do it again.  Some of the people involved have gone on to fame, none greater than  Gary Mortimer, now a slowly fading star  named Gareth Caulfield.  

But whatever you call him, he is an unpleasant person, and someone is after revenge. The question is: what kind?

The problem with an anthology with this narrow a focus is that a lot of the stories tend to resemble each other.  (Deaths on stage; ambitious understudies...)  Daly manages to break the pattern in interesting ways.  And the title is very clever indeed.

 

Woodstock, by Michael Bracken

 "Woodstock," by Michael Bracken, in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, November/December 2020.

This is the seventh appearance in this space by my fellow SleuthSayer Michael Bracken.  That puts him close to the top of the list of repeat offenders.  This time he is a long distance from his usual territory, both geographically and thematically.

It's August 1969 and Shirley Warner picks up a hitchhiker who explains he is on his way to a music festival near Woodstock, New York.  The hitcher, a hippie, decides she looks like a Shirley.  "A housewife.  Her old man takes the train into the city five days a week, expects dinner on the table and a fresh martini waiting when he gets home.  Most exciting thing a Shirley does is watch Wild Kingdom Sunday nights to see if Him Fowler gets mauled by something." 

Shirley's response?  She throws her wedding rings out the window.

And that is how the story proceeds.  Shirley's reaction to the famous Three Days of Peace and Music, tells us all we know (or need to know) about her immediate past.  By the time it is over her life is moving in a new direction.

A well-written story.

Handed, on a Gold Plate, by Robert Mangeot

 

"Handed, on a Gold Plate," by Robert Mangeot, in Mystery Weekly Magazine, November 2020.

This is the fifth appearance here by my fellow SleuthSayer, the very funny Robert Mangeot.  

Wade is an auditor and  he is about to achieve his life's ambition by representing the accounting firm on a lottery draw.  

It’s where a star auditor ride gets launched intro flash by intro flash if the auditor is poised enough, debonair enough, the public assured enough.

Perhaps he can work his way up to award shows!

But among the obstacles he faces are the lotto guy who doesn't want to hear a peep out of him.  "I’ll know a peep is coming because your brains will smoke cranking into peep mode."

But the bigger problem is his suspicion that the lottery draw has somehow been fixed.  If he doesn't speak up he is a failure as an auditor, but if he squeals and is wrong... hoo boy.

Hilarious.

My Simple Plan, by Ariel Gore

 

 "My Simple Plan," by Ariel Gore, in The Nicotine Chronicles, edited by Lee Child, Akashic Press, 2020.

The publisher sent me a free copy of this book.  Much appreciated.

All the stories in this book are about tobacco; not all are about crime.  This one definitely qualifies.

Our nameless narrator is stuck in a tiny village in Tuscany. The residents scorn him as a homosexual and, worse, an American.  But he has a plan for making big bucks.

The Italian tobacco workers are on strike and our hero has two backpacks full of precious ciggies.  He plans to wait a few days for desperation to build up and then sell individual smokes at a boomed-up price.

One tiny problem: someone who arrives in town with black market cigarettes is murdered.  And that means: 1. Someone in town is willing to kill for a smoke, and 2. Anyone with cartons of cigarettes is an obvious suspect for the killing.  So, that's two problems, really, and neither of them are tiny.

I saw one plot twist coming but another one delighted me.  Very clever story.

Goon #4, by Tod Goldberg

 "Goon #4," by Tod Goldberg, in The Darkling Halls of Ivy, edited by Lawrence Block, LB Productions, 2020.

It makes sense that this story appears in an anthology edited by Lawrence Block because the main character reminds me of Block's meditative hitman, Keller.

Goon #4 (his mama named him Blake) is an ex-military thug, now specializing in high-risk assignments, bodyguarding bad guys or making bad guys wish, in one final moment, that they had hired bodyguards.

Blake has made enough money to retire.  But what to do now?  He decides to go to college and winds up, more or less by accident, in a class on radio performing.  Here he is pondering the building in which the class is taught:

Whole place was maybe 2,500 square feet and could be attacked from about twenty-nine different angles.  A totally unsafe spot to conduct an op... but Blake guessed it was probably fine for learning.

So Blake may be has a little trouble separating his past life from his current one.  And when a professor gives him an assignment, rest assured that he takes all assignments seriously.  Perhaps too seriously...

A fun and quirky story.

Alt-AC, by Warren Moore

 "Alt-AC," by Warren Moore, in The Darkling Halls of Ivy, edited by Lawrence Block, LB Productions, 2020.

This is the second appearance here by Warren Moore.  It ranges between the amusing and startling.

I may be prejudiced in favor of this tale because I am both an academic and the father of an academic, so I sympathize with both generations represented here.

Roger Patterson possesses a newly minted PhD. in medieval English.  He has been in Kalamazoo for the annual conference on medieval studies and he offers a Senior Scholar a trip to the airport.  Beggs, the Senior Scholar, turns out to be a historian, with a comfy job of the kind Patterson will probably never get.

Patterson is on the market (a phrase that  "made him feel like a haunted house.  Or a slightly bruised avocado") at a time when there are over a hundred people applying for every position.  He is likely to wind up teaching at  "the Swamp County School of Mortuary Science and Transmission Repair."   Or worse he may need to find an alternative to academia, the dreaded "Alt-AC."

The writing is hilarious but I found myself thinking: this is a book of crime stories.  So somebody has to get naughty, right?  Don't worry.  Somebody does.

The Whole Story, by Andrew Welsh-Huggins

 

"The Whole Story," by Andrew Welsh-Huggins, in Black Cat Mystery Magazine, Issue 7, 2020.

This is the second appearance here by this author.

Hayes is a private eye with a strange assignment.  Bobby Putnam is in prison for driving drunk, resulting in the death of his daughter.  He doesn't deny the crime but he wants Hayes to confirm his impression that the driver whose truck he hit was not looking at him.  His eyes, Putnam insists, were on a man across the street,  man who vanished before the cops arrived.

Not that it would have changed Putnam's guilt.   But he is desperate to know if he's right about this one niggling detail about the event that destroyed his life.

Of course there turns out to be more to this clever story.

Chum in the Water, by Lori Roy

 "Chum in the Water," by Lori Roy, in Tampa Bay Noir, edited by Colette Bancroft, Akashic Press, 2020.

Ms Roy knows her noir, no doubt about that.

Dale is a building contractor and house flipper and he has run into a bad season made worse by bad luck and bad choices.  One of those choices was borrowing a ton of money from Chum Giordano.  Chum has a reputation for not taking kindly to deadbeats.

But on the positive side of the ledger Dale has two items.  His house is about to sell, which will take care of his debt.  And there is an attractive new bartender in his favorite bar who is showing an interest in him.  

Sounds good!  What could possibly go wrong?

Oh yeah.  This is noir...

Terrible Ideas, by Gregory Fallis

 "Terrible  Ideas," by Gregory Fallis, in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, September/October 2020.

It's unusual, I think for a private eye story to travel, third-person, through the heads of more than one character.  But this one does and it works.

Clayton Ellicott is the first viewpoint character.  He is the only fulltime lawyer for Midwest Center for Artists' Rights and most of his work is pretty boring: copyright, contacts, and so on.  

The exception is Triscuit, a petty thief who discovers a talent for photography after stealing an expensive camera.  It isn't the theft that gets him in trouble, though.  That would be a day he spent in the park taking pictures, some of them in the vicinity of small children.  Parents didn't like that.  When the police were called and saw that he was "a six-foot-two bearded man of mixed race" they didn't like it either.

Triscuit knew how to behave around hostile cops, but now he was an artist and they were demanding to see his camera.  He did not react well to that, which is how Ellicott the lawyer got involved.

Things escalate when a teenager girl goes missing from that same park.  Triscuit gets arrested and our lawyer calls in Hockney, a private eye.  

It helped that [Hockney] looked younger than she really was; it helped that she was attractive without being pretty.  it helped that she was slender and lissome and not at all threatening.

It all helped her to be a more effective detective.  But she resented it.  She resented that people -- women included -- took one look at her and immediately, automatically underestimated her...

And here she is talking to Triscuit, who is in jail: 

There's a sixteen-year-old white girl missing and the police think you had something to do with it.  Jesus couldn't get you out of here tonight.

A satisfying story with a surprising (but not twist) ending. 

The Cough, by Lynn Chandler Willis

 "The Cough," by Lynn Chandler Willis, in Writers Crushing COVID-19, edited by Lawrence Kelter, LightSpeed Books, 2020.

There's been a sort of race going on this year and, as far as I know, Willis is the winner.  She is the first person to get a story published in which COVID masks are used by robbers as a disguise.  You knew it had to be coming. 

That's not why this story is my best of the week, of course. The reason is that it is an amusing story of incompetent criminals.

Marty and Dwayne are hoping to rob a bank but the virus lockdown means that only drive-thru's are open. Foiled again!

Marty is the brains of the operation (and that is a low bar).  Dwayne seems as happy to score some toilet paper as he would be with the contents of a bank safe.

But our hero thinks of a way to rob the WalMart.  You my not be astonished that things don't go perfectly.  You may be even less astonished that COVID is involved.

My favorite line: When the two guys get separated and complain someone asks Marty: "You his emotional support animal or something?" 

 

Kevin of the Dead, by Eoin Colfer

 

"Kevin of the Dead," by Eoin Colfer, in The Strand Magazine, Feb.-May 2020.

A page into this story I found myself hoping a crime would show up.  It was by no means a sure thing that that would happen, and I only review crime stories.  Fortunately, the story turned sufficiently criminous, as Ellery Queen used to say, to meet my standards.

So what is this about if not primarily crime?

It's a vampire story.  But Kevin is not your classic suave gothic (or goth) undead master of minds.  He's a whiny emo young man with a lot to complain about.  

"In my opinion there's a real market for vampire counsellors.  Someone to guide you through the process.  It's very traumatic waking up dead, I can tell you.  Not as traumatic as high school but pretty close."     

Our boy had a hard time getting along with people when he was alive and things haven't improved since he snuffed it.  Colfer offers us a more (dare I say?) realistic look at the undead lifestyle and it's hilarious.  Kevin goes out each night looking for blood but he also hopes his victim has "Netflix on her phone so I can catch up on Stranger Things."

Golden Lives, by Joseph S. Walker

 

"Golden Lives," by Joseph S. Walker, in Mystery Weekly Magazine, September, 2020.

Annalee Lincoln left the army due to an accident that removed her foot.  Three months later she is home because her brother Ike died, in another accident.  This one happened while he was attempting to commit a rather stupid felony.

Annalee has trouble grasping that, because Ike was the smart one.  They were raised by their worthless uncle and Annalee feels the guilt common of older siblings who escape from a toxic home and have to leave the younger ones to cope without them.  

She can't bring him back but can she figure out what happened?  And maybe find love along the way?

Very satisfactory story.

No Body, by Clea Simon

"No Body," by Clea Simon, in Shattering Glass, edited by Heather Graham, Nasty Women Press, 2020. 

Before she even spoke she knew her body was gone. It had been a struggle, losing it. 

At first I thought the protagonist was a ghost, but no, she is a person in trauma experiencing, as some people do in such a situation, the sensation of being outside her own body. In fact, she was drugged and is being raped. 

None of the characters in this story are named, and the protagonist is never "the woman," but simply "she." It is a stylistic choice that keeps the story as intimate and claustrophobic. And this story is strong on style. 

The main character is a college student and the rapist is a popular student who lives right down the hall. He doesn't stop tormenting her, either, joking with his friends about her. But then... 

 I said this story is mostly about style, so honestly I was not expecting a clever and unexpected plot twist. But that's what you get.

Nicking Votes, by Stephen Buehler

"Nicking Votes," by Stephen Buehler, in Low Down Dirty Vote 2, edited by Mysti Berry, Berry Content Corporation, 2020.

I have a story in this book, by the way.

It's the summer of 1974 and con man Nick Townson is having a bit of hard luck.  His (stolen) car is overheating so he has to pull into a small desert town named Promise.  He will have to wait overnight for repairs and figures to while away the time by conning the locals out of some money with bar bets and similar tricks.

But it turns out there is an election going on, with two candidates for mayor: a sleazy developer and the attractive owner of the bar where Nick is playing his sneaky games.  Nick has no interest in politics but he may have no choice but to get involved.

A lot of clever twists in this one.

The Law of Local Karma, by Susan Dunlap

 "The Law of Local Karma," by Susan Dunlap, in Berkeley Noir, edited by Jerry Thompson and Owen Hill, Akashic Press, 2020.

The publisher sent me an Advance Reader Copy of this book.

When Sergeant Endo Maduri talked about the case later he'd start off, "That was the last time Shelby and I rode together.  It made some of the guys on the force uncomfortable, but Maduri didn't care.

That is the opening paragraph, and it sets the hook nicely.  Is it the last time because Shelby dies, or retires, or because the two cops decide they can't work together?  It certainly made me want to turn pages and find out.

It's a winter afternoon in Berkeley and someone has killed a real estate flipper.  That means there are tons of suspects because lots of people had reasons to hate the guy, including police officer Shelby  and their only witness, a college kid named Janssen.  Maduri and Shelby get the witness in their car for a search around the neighborhood and he manages to include Lisa, a woman who is way out of his league, but would like the excitement of a trip in a police car.

Maduri is trying desperately  to keep the kid's attention on possible suspects while Janssen is much more interested in Lisa.  And Shelby, nearing retirement age and grumpy as hell, seems to have lost interest in the whole deal.  There are some clever twists here.

I must say this story almost lost me on the first page.  Maybe it's just me but I had a hell of a time figuring out who was who.  Is Shelby Callahan's first name?  Is one or both of them the patrolwoman?  Who is the suspect that everyone loses interest in but leaves face down on the sidewalk?  

Only the Desperate Come Here, by Michael Mallory

 

"Only the Desperate Come Here," by Michael Mallory, in Mystery Weekly Magazine, August 2020.

I made a huge embarassing gaffe in an earlier version of this review.  My apologies.

 This is the fifth appearance here by my friend Michael Mallory.

When a client goes to attorney Scott Turley they know they are scraping the bottom of the barrel.  He lives in a room at the Y and his dinner is whiskey.

So it is a surprise when Carl Bone the Third, son of a city councilman, comes to him.  Seems he killed an old college buddy in the alley next to the bar where he worked.  Turley knows the ropes and has some tricks up his sleeves, but fate has a few aces he will need to deal with...

My favorite line: "While confession might be good for the soul, it was terrible for billable legal fees."

Clever stuff.

What Brings You Back Home, by Michelle Richmond

"What Brings You Back Home," by Michelle Richmond, in Alabama Noir, edited by Don Noble, Akashic Press, 2020,

The publisher sent me a free copy of this book.

This is a sly one.  I enjoyed it a lot.

The nameless protagonist has returned to her childhood home of Mobile.  If anyone asks she leads them to think that her work is "as innocuous as it is forgettable.  She's in marketing, right?  Or is it advertising?"

Neither one, as it turns out.  She's up to something else, but maybe not entirely unrelated to those professions mentioned above.  And maybe they aren't as innocuous as they seem...

Twice I thought I knew where this story was going.  Twice I was fooled. Midway through we realize what is going on and the trajectory changes, becomes more, shall we say, polemic.  That wouldn't have worked nearly so well if Richmond hadn't set it up with the first-half.

Title is a nice choice. And here is my favorite bit of writing for the week:

"When you come from poor, poor is always in your head..."

Colibrí, by Nicolás Obregón

"Colibrí," by Nicolás Obregón, in Both Sides: Stories From The Border, edited by Gabino Iglesias, Polis Books, 2020.

Milagros Posada is the deputy sheriff of a county near the Mexican border.  It is not a job that comes with much respect.

When the body of a dead Mexican teenager is found on the Fourth of July, Mili's boss, the elderly sheriff,  responds  that the "stiff'll keep till Monday."  Mili doesn't accept that and goes out to the scene. "I'm just hiking," she unconvincingly tells the Border Patrol man who finds her there.

There's no crime here except illegal border crossing and human smuggling.  The kid died of natural causes.

But Mili is determined to learn his identity and get the news back to his family.  Nobody else seems interested in the job.  It turns out Mili has tragedy in her past and is willing to use that as a tool to get information.

This is a quiet and moving story.

The Cask of Los Alamos, by Cornelia Read

"The Cask of Los Alamos," by Cornelia Read, in Santa Fe Noir, edited by Ariel Gore, Akashic Press, 2020.

The publisher sent me a free copy of this book.

If you were to define stories from Akashic Press's Noir Cities series in one word, which words would show up the most often?  Grim, depressing, violent, affected, suspenseful, cynical...  How about quirky?  Probably not that often.

This story is quirky.  Let's start, reasonably enough, with the first line.

The thousand injuries of Richard Feynman I had borne as best I could. But when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge.

If that sentence, together with the title, does not immediately bring a certain short story to mind then you need to enroll immediately in Remedial Mystery Reading 101. 

We are in a historical mystery (also a rarity in the Noir Cities books), not going back to the time of Edgar Allan Poe (except in spirit) but to World War II.  The Manhattan Project is toiling away in New Mexico and our narrator, Thurston, has taken a deep grudge against his fellow physicist.

A good deal of this story is based on Feynman's actual life, and I was amazed to realize how little I had known about it.  For example, the way he chose to watch the first atomic explosion is drawn from life.

Read has combined these true details with her fictional character's plot which is, of course, modeled on Poe's.  She carries off this combination with great panache.  Does Thurston succeed in killing Feynman, turning this into an alternative history story?  Or i this an altogether different type of tale?

Wouldn't you like to know?

No Honor Among Thieves, by Rob Hart

"No Honor Among Thieves," by Rob Hart, in Lockdown: Stories of Crime, Terror, and Hope During a Pandemic, edited by Nick Kolakowski and Steve Weddle, PolisBooks, 2020.

The proceeds for this book go to the Book Industry Charitable Foundation, a very worthy cause.

This is the third appearance in this column by Rob Hart.

Roger is a banker.  He is working from home due to Covid but he needs to get some files he can't access electronically.  Why aren't they available digitally?  Because they contain data you don't dare expose to hackers, stuff that could get people sent to jail.

It turns out other people want those files too.  People who are more determined than he is...

A nice bad guy versus worse guy story.

By the way, Ann Davila Cardinal has a very nice ghost story in this book, but I don't review ghost stories.